Planet Girl
~for Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, who was once called Jim.
You’re going to hurt somebody.
Why not settle for androgyny?
Call it that, and slide it shut
as a matchbox.
I know. Still.
There you are in the woods
pretending not to hear the leaves.
Planet Girl rocks.
Girl boy. Boy girl.
The woods full of
fusilage, Playboy covering your tracks
with debris on the way home to supper.
You there, Boy.
What are you doing?
Nothing. Nothing not boy
enough, Mr. Solo. (You knew it
before you knew it,
Jimmy Jenny.)
Bras like Braille
in scratched-walled rooms
of trees you called your own
wearing your sister’s
shirts, your mother’s skirts
like sway, like gauze.
Years, and only
shame as heavy
as Irish rains on a pub roof
slate-thick with men’s’ talk,
the floor coated with the foam
of a roan’s chafing.
Oh, to lay, just lay
Looking up at the eyeless sky,
your bicycle wheels spinning
between the here and there, askew
like you always knew.
Enough.
I know.
Still.
Not all men know
where to put their hands
in the dark.
Crossing her legs, so
the outside of one calf
falls in a corn silk line
down the other,
tighter than Huck’s fence,
looser than husks.
***
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