April 25

“Mimmie”

She had always wanted a girl.
When her boys were young and grasshopper-legged
she sewed the same three letters to the insides of all their exoskeletons;
she had named all three of them with identical initials,
different from the ones she had tucked away
for the daughter that never happened.

The first boy steeped in creation and
Creationism. He taxidermied birds and soldered stained glass,
storytold and storytold and storytold.
Now, chip-chinned and balding,
he preaches resurrection in a room illuminated
by mosaic windows
in a town the size of an illustrated
pocket-bible.

The third boy seethed in the loneliness of being the littlest.
He learned to whet his words and
throw them like daggers;
it was his only defense.
Now, with two boys of his own,
he uses his law degree to raise them to be
fastest smartest loudest but still
lonely.

The middle boy, as all middle boys must,
mediated.

But she always wanted a girl,
a long-haired rose-hip-lipped Cherokee-cheeked
girldollchild, not these
thorny-shouldered tumbleweed-limbed sons,
too bright to look directly at amidst all the blue of
a Wyoming sky.

The middle boy,
he’s my father.
On the day 45 years after she was born
so was I.
He whittled me girl and
sharpened me loud.

When I laugh, my noes wrinkles the same way hers does.
My cheeks are just as Cherokee as hers
but my eyes are more Wyoming sky
and my hands storytell loneliness.
She had always wanted a girl.

The Sunday two years ago we all held hands around her table
to celebrate the rising son
I rolled the boulder out from in front of my throat
and told her my hands held another girl’s.

All she could do was tumbleweed her head back and forth
back and forth and back and forth and
smile in a way that made her tears
collect in the raingutter wrinkles that her laughter
has installed on the bridge of her nose.

She had always wanted a girl,
not two.

April 21 (poem 21)

"convenience feminist"

“You’re a convenience feminist,”
my dad said;
his definition of feminist is
a woman who changes the oil in her own goddamn car;
and since I have a bike,
two good feet, and a license it took me six years
to nurture the courage to get,
I have little use for
oil.

April 10

“to the boy I asked to the dance six years ago”

I never told you thank you.
Your hull-rough chin,
protractor corners,
and envelope lips
taught me that the thing I like most about boys
is Old Spice.
I do not regret the porchfront moment when
you asked for a kiss and I said No;
thank you for answering
the question I had not yet asked myself:
now I know
I like Old Spice best
on girls.

April 2

"The Virginity Tree"
trigger warning: sexual assault

Prologue.
Andrea Gibson said to write the hardest poem.

One.
There are too many bruises in the word that does not belong between my legs.
It is four letters too many
which is to say it is four letters more than silence.
It is not a word that girls can give to other girls.

Two.
There is a tree that I can see from my room.
It’s heavy with shoes tied to its fingers as
reminders of what it means to be barefoot,
to be naked and touching for the first time.
It’s a tradition where I live:
you lose your shoes along with your virginity,
hang the pair in the tree.

Three.
Sometimes I imagine that I can erect fences around sections of my body,
miniature white picket spines designating parts of me as private property.
That is new; I used to imagine my body as a body.

Four.
There is a reason I remove my shoes every time I arrive somewhere new.
It’s the same reason I trust forests more than pickup lines.

Five.
My mother is a survivor,
a word she pronounces “victim”
and which she thinks pronounces her different,
even though the statistic is one in six.
One in six.

Six.
What is the meaning of the word legacy?

Seven.
I cannot bring myself to hang my sneakers –
the faded ones with rainbow laces and peeling heels –
in a tree so clamorous with happiness.
They would make terrible wind chimes.

Eight.
When the Womyn’s Center on my college campus strings the dirty laundry
of women’s shelter stories on a clothesline and calls it Take Back the Night art therapy
there is not a t-shirt there that fits me;
there is a man behind every curtain,
between every line.

Nine.
Her fingers knew the words crime,
No,
And Stop,
but she thinks her fingers can’t count.

Ten.
I called her “girlfriend” after that night,
called it a rite of passage
instead of wrong,
didn’t file a report because it took me three years
to even realize anything had been stolen
and not given freely.

Epilogue.
I still have not told my mother exactly how
precisely
I have filled her shoes.