Because we don’t know how to lose
Because we don’t know how to lose we lie in bedrooms feet splayed against ice cream tinted walls, pink mint and blue. Pack knock-off totes with mace and lip gloss. Post dance routines we delete before morning because we don’t know how to lose. Doom scroll Tik-Tok, don’t leave drinks unattended, pray to god and Jesus and the man down the street that he’ll just pass by and stop standing there, stop standing legs wide as a compass with excavator eyes because we don’t know. Draw our curtains against the street and sun, pretend we’re safe in the house because we don’t know how to lose. Regulate our eyes and hair and throat and breasts, the slope of our stomachs, gap of thighs, the food we eat,the way we stretch the friends we make, the clothes we wear,the clothes we don’t wear, the clothes our friends wear while we still have friends. Please excuse the sound of our voice, that vocal fry, that noise like a furnace because we don’t know how to lose. Because we bend. Like trees. Flow like rivers, know a whole vocabulary of smiles, such range of choice flight freeze and fawn because we don’t. Know how to lose. Wear clothes too small and rings too tight and learn to breathe leftover air and don’t get sick or tired or sad or mad because we don’t. Know how to live. In smaller boxes, smaller pockets, there’s always another smaller to come, just watch how little we can be and when baby girls cry, when baby girls scream when baby girls run when baby girls sing when baby girls play, before we’re here too long, before we overstay, outlive our use, exist too much, we teach them. How not to lose. Like us.
Violet
The day the plane almost falls from the sky you watch the news with your always pursed mouth because the world tumbles in if you move your lips. Make a sucking sound like wind through pierced metal, swoop around the room arms bent like a heron. You won’t open your mouth but you’d leap from that hole. You don’t know the difference between bees and wasps. Who will defend you from the world but me?
We run out of cereal and milk, again. Sit with sun squeezing through the cracks of your pink childhood curtains, your single bed full of damp dreams you don’t remember. You think you disappear when you close your eyes and sob through clamped teeth until I drag myself humpbacked with sheets to lie beside you on the floor. Wake up to you drawing dawn with sticky fingers on my skin.
No one warned me of this thirst. Your throat bulges like a baby bird, my chin is streaked red and there’s no one to feed us. I swallow the sun to protect you from heat and you unearth an old lipstick from the closed room down the hall with the chilled air of fairy tale. A relic of the lilac-lipped mother with the slender dresses of night, drink in hand to quell her nerves, breaking promises to be back soon. Your skin the shade of moonlight beneath the violet streaks. Delicate as the finch you catch to sing you to sleep. It slips away before morning, just another vanishing behind closed doors.
Crimson smear of menstrual blood the day of the door knock, your first period since, as if your frozen body unclenched just in time for that fist. Awkward boots and the smell of rain in their hair. You think you disappear when you close your eyes but only I dissolve in the spreading light of the door.
‘Your mother,’ they start to say but of course you know, like you know the whine of tearing metal, the difference between wasps and bees. The distance between flying and falling.
Comments