my tongue remembers the familiar, the
girlhood it burned over onions eaten like apples,
brought empty tears as I binded my
barbie's hands, feet with toilette paper so she couldn't move I
called her Sexy, did a dance for my mother's camera but her eyes
didn't blink like my own at times didn't blink. I sucked on a quarter
got stuck in my throat no one saved me my throat learned early to
save itself by gagging. Peeling back the bark from a birch tree to
leave raw skin beneath I imagined the tree feeling as I did picking
the edge of each scab till it bled-fell to the pavement and wind to
the smell of juniper, always takes me back to that little white house
with the picket fence and inside it the attic of my room swallowing
me in its pale pink, my magic rock collection arranged according to
color: the blues, then the yellows. And the giant bear I played
boyfriend with though it hadn't all the parts, had soft, stuffed hips
I mimicked the act and later peed in a bucket for release, to be more
bear-like: more free with less bones I left the forgotten bucket
beneath the bed. Like a memory it filled the house full in a week
with an unattended stinch, so foul even denial couldn't keep my
mother away. Girls will be bears she never said and that night I
renamed the constellation Bart Simpson on a motorcyle from the
star-pieces of Orion's belt. No one could see it but me, out on the
roof, bird's-eye-viewing the street lights, each house I imagined,
lonely as my own.
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