Girls
by Caroline Fernelius
This—this is how I come back
To you—heralding the ponytail holders I thought
I had lost and spoon feeding the self all that
Unspent rage, rose gold watch
From December of 2016 and the spongey
Decals we used to put up on our walls, the bathroom
Mirror, sony desktop but guess what I’m mad.
I guess you knew it all along, and arms around my
Waist with which to perform an exorcism. Why all the
People with their used-up erasers falling everywhere,
The thin stringy remnants of words on my coat and in my
Keyboard and on the pet chihuahua—It yelps and I can’t blame
It (We are so done throwing knowingness
To the wind, I tell him, and yet, yet, yet)—
I want to write myself into being via negation, via
The hair at the back of the knee (what is it doing? For whom and for
What is it existing? From whom and from what is it protecting?)
And also via the color purple, color not the book. To have a body
Of and in purple. They would cut me out at the end of all this,
I’m sure, and find the stuff everywhere--where the breast plate is,
Purple. The purpled pancreas and even the nose, what drips--
Itself into existence. Purple running through those shipping leins
They gave me for veins and the dog still yelping, I think it can
Sense when the toaster has been unplugged for six weeks
And no, really, I’m not fine. Wondering what Walt Whitman would
Think of the TI-84 calculator, the cover wet with plastic,
The returns the stuff of witchcraft. And so. Pythagoras
Was a poet too.