You never asked for it, but you sure as hell
took it: this little space I made for you,
like I once did for the pair of iridescent flip-flops
my stepsister fished from the synthetics of my
teenage closet, and slipped like tongues into her overnight bag.
You’re the prom kiss I may never have:
my bubble gum, stiff as taffeta, bulging your cheek;
my silk dress cooling your head like ocean water;
paste-and-glow stars above us—and your lips—agleam.
We’re already in the future. You’re a ream of code
humming beneath my pillow; your avatar’s aura
shaming my bedroom’s dark like a luna moth.
The broken crescent my body makes as I text
is a halting question you refuse to answer
in exchanges about long-distance loves and first drafts.
My critiques are geometries of emojis, each sweating face
a tiny planet strung on a craft wire of hope,
like the planetarium my mother once made for my science fair.
Or maybe it was my sister’s. I come from women
who save their best work for people who won’t remember it.
Your published version is identical to the first.
Your new woman is identical to the last,
and I am fifteen again, in my mother’s car.
She’s asking if she should get married again tomorrow,
hair already pinned to her scalp, formaldehyde tips
floundering in her lap like poison-gummed wings.
After high school, I forgot the number of rings
around Saturn or my moon-clogged heart,
how it ossified the woman I might have become
like a prehistoric insect spinning in amber.
There’s enough petrified in me, waiting
for the leer and thaw of your precise language
to begin, like opening strains of The Twilight Zone.
And the spiraling contexts of your lines,
testing the gullibility of my sight:
what am I willing to let you tell me I see?
When did you become galaxies under my fingerprints:
my dactyl eye pressed against the screen?
When did I become calculation, theory,
Styrofoam, and wet paint where red dunes, potable water
should be?
Birdsong’s collection of poetry, Negotiations, will be available from Tin House on Oct. 13.
