When You Are Fifteen
You meet a boy that gives you
reading assignments, leaf through Candide
and Slaughterhouse Five and 1984, biographies
of Morrison and Cobain and Clapton.
When you scream at each other, it is erotic
like climbing up into the rickety deer stand
to sit in the torn office chair that rocks
back too far. The stands all have names—
The Hornet’s Nest, The Apartment, The Hole.
You notice when men get creative—
how small they are, their camouflage. No one
tells you to read The Bell Jar, but you wonder
about the girl who compared pregnancy to eating
a bag of green apples. You read and re-read
the paragraph about Esther’s roommate—
hot girl with a tan, white strapless corset.
When Plath says she bulges “spectacularly,”
you whisper “spectacularly.” The word doe
becomes fat to you, such roundness
at its middle, such meat. You are a curse
in a deer stand—no antlers near the corn pile.
Stillness at the tree line. Your fingertips numb
against the stock, the pines ache and whistle
like metaphors. You close your eyes and imagine
falling, imagine yourself a tree trunk, a needle
on the forest floor swathed in a twilight
that eats you like the ocean would, piece by piece.
