X

Junior says, “Don’t worry! Don’t worry!” as we enter the club
We end up worrying, but in moderation

Yoni asks, “Am I clean? Lord, please, why me?”
I heard it on both sides of a baggie of Colombian cocaine

Cody says he misses me and wishes he could’ve come with
I send him pictures from the top of the world

Chelsie speaks Spanish with her barber in Santa Rosa de Cabal
I listen, porously, as if it were the word of God

Annie says, “I don’t wanna be a cheerleader no more”
Every girl in the world sings along

Joyce kisses us and calls us possessive pet names
We know she’s just good at her job, but we blush all the same

Cat says, “If we don’t wanna learn then let’s go big and go hard”
I pretend I’ve never met her so that I can hear it as music and not politics

Elena says, “Look!” and buys sparkling gold jelly shoes
We’re all envious, but I see her smallest toe blistering already



XI

I am swaying, motion sick, sticky, in a holey mosquito-netted hammock. Rows of cocooned travelers make up this camp compound, set by the ocean, but moreso by the septic tank. A generator hums and vibrates petroleum through the wind’s trajectory. Dogs with atrophied legs meander the property for scraps and for the handsy children that reside at the park. It’s dark as black outside of my lantern’s reach and the bats navigate it with olympic ease, screeching. Where is the bats’ taste for malarial insects as I claw at my speckled legs until they bleed? My friend, wrapped end-to-end, claws at her brain’s wandering. Are there bats for that? I am swaying, like-I-said sick in this setting, and it seems as though I have set my character up for something. Seems this was all exposition.



XII

I told him we were to make out for just one minute, and so we did. After that minute was up, I took his half-sucked Tootsie Pop, bit it in half, gave it back, and walked down the painted porch stairs. “I am woman,” I thought.

Unfortunately, I was not woman. I was power. Woman needs not push man or break his things. Woman needs not do anything she doesn’t mean. I was woman the next morning when I woke up feeling badly. I was woman because I felt exactly like myself.