Life of the Party Read online

  that what swells is not always a wound. she wakes,

  hours later, to an orchestra of breath in the next room

  and makes her way down the hall, hovers in the doorway,

  and sees a dozen girls in white, quivering against the carpet.

  for a moment, a small chaos blooms in her sternum,

  cheeks erupt with blood, the dance of denial

  in her stomach, and then she remembers her own

  small ghosts—the curl of her best friend’s toes in a room

  like this one, breath echoing from her pillow

  back into her mouth again and again, like this,

  until she grew tired and resolved herself into the floor.

  NO BAPTISM

  Once, everything was a gift. Once, anything

  resembling the thing we wanted was the thing

  we wanted. We were not yet gangly and scowling

  at the generic cereal in the cabinet

  or knock-off Adidas slides with four stripes.

  When we begged for a swimming pool and my father

  filled trash cans with hose water, we saw

  what was made for our bodies and no one else’s;

  when he built a playhouse from splintered

  plywood, with a metal slide, we saw a giant

  silver tongue spilling into the dirt.

  When the sun lifted itself to its highest point,

  a proud bully, and the city became a third-degree

  burn, we ignored the desert curfew and instead

  heard the slide singing, One more ride,

  imagined ourselves floating without burns

  to the ground. So I stood at the top, naked

  under my dress, and let my legs unfold in front

  of me, lace parachute ballooning from my hips,

  bare butt to the metal, blisters hatching

  like small eggs, rising, pink yolks,

  I heard the drought laughing

  with its smoker’s throat:

  There’s no water for you here.

  the pain I don’t say

  out loud, builds a home

  inside me.

  FIRST GRADE, 1998

  Dylan got busted for bringing a bullet to school & when he slipped the casing out of his pocket like a rare pill we were all certain that the hollow point would explode at any second, our bodies tense and heavy like a dozen dying suns, we imagined his hand blown to confetti but I knew he came from a family that shot big game, I knew they had a meat freezer & glass-eyed deer on every wall, so it wasn’t his fault he didn’t see bullets the way the rest of us did, something he could toss up and catch in his palm with ease & it was the same year my lips were so chapped that the red crack ran up beneath my nose & I couldn’t stop licking the wound & when I left class to hold my burning mouth against the water fountain, Frankie was passed out & bleeding from his forehead on the hallway floor & Ms. Rosemary said I might have saved his life, whether that’s true, I don’t know, what I do know is that Frankie was a redheaded soundless child & after that he wouldn’t stop talking about almost dying but never gave me credit for discovering his body & the next week Jeremy launched himself off a swing set & his forearm bone shot through his bent wrist, I saw it, anyway, I heard the word fractured in a spelling bee so when I ran to tell Ms. Amy, I was set on flaunting my new vocabulary but the hard corners jutted into my cheeks & my memory went soft & so I just stood there stuttering about the skeleton & finally, when Ms. Amy found Jeremy in the grass, the word wriggled its way into my mouth & I shouted, It’s fractured! & Ms. Amy whipped & snapped, It’s so much more than that, but I was just happy to have spoken my new language & then there was the family of baby pink mice in the reading corner & Carl, my favorite custodian, had to remove them, but rumor has it that he gathered them in a sock & smashed them under a rock in the parking lot & I couldn’t look at him the same after that, based on my understanding he was a murderer of tiny things & we were tiny things, I remember, even then, understanding the smallness of myself, of all of us & the way we had to dodge & skip through the world like rodents under the boots of men, except for once, when Miguel went on vacation to Mexico & was killed in a collapsed cave & we planted him a tree but it was just a seedling, no taller than my right knee & when we all stood in a circle to wish him goodbye, I remember looking at the struggling plant, its wiry arms & frail trunk & feeling, for the first time, big.

  [my favorite pastime is watching the babysitter put her hair into a ponytail. she smooths it flat against her scalp & even when i think it must be perfect she smooths it again, gathers the overflow in her fist and removes a black elastic from her wrist, stretches and slaps till there’s no slack, splits the tail in two & yanks the arms apart, forehead skin strained taut against her skull, eyebrows pulled to an arch like a doll drawn happy.]

  THE FIRST SHAVE

  I am nine.

  We are bored

  and Karen is dying.

  We drove to Austin

  that summer

  so Sarah’s dad—

  who described Karen as

  the great and impossible love

  of his life, who taught us

  the word lymphoma and then

  the concept of the prefix,

  how it explains where the tumor lives—

  could say goodbye.

  The house is a rind

  spooned out by the onset of death,

  what’s left is a medicine cabinet

  full of razors & we are hungry

  & alone & sitting

  on the living room floor

  where the light

  from a naked window

  slices the hardwood

  like melon, exposes

  each individual fuzz

  on my scabbed calf,

  a field of erect, yellow poppies

  & we have been alive as girls

  long enough to know

  to scowl at this reveal

  & what better time

  than now to practice removal.

  Once, I watched my mother

  skin a potato in six

  perfect strokes.

  I remember this

  as Sarah teaches me

  to prop up my leg

  on the side of the tub

  and runs the blade

  along my thigh. See?

  she says. Isn’t that so much better?

  Before we left Albuquerque

  her father warned us,

  She will have no hair,

  a trait

  we have just

  begun to admire

  except, of course,

  for the hair he is talking about,

  that which we hold against our necks,

  that which will get us

  husbands or compliments

  or scouted in a mall,

  eventually cut off

  by our envious sisters

  while we sleep.

  ALL OF THE BEAUTIFUL ONES WERE CATHOLIC

  tight buns at the napes of their necks

  hair combed slick behind their ears

  & middle parts so straight they might

  have been split with a razor by their mothers

  that morning. they didn’t wear jewelry except

  for purity rings & golden rosaries, thin chains

  crawling over the humps of their clavicles.

  there was no word for godless then

  so i lied, said i too had a first communion

  wore a buttercream dress & all the photos

  were in storage, memorized the prayers

  i needed &
said them as bored as i could,

  played apathetic towards my new king.

  jenna believed me until she came over

  & quietly scanned the walls of my parents’ house,

  which were empty mostly except for a few

  paintings of fish & men carrying fruit.

  finally, upstairs, she whispered that she knew

  i wasn’t a girl of the lord, that she wouldn’t tell

  anyone as long as i told her what i was.

  i am nothing, i said, prouder than i meant it.

  she was forgiving & offered to take me to church

  so that i could learn how to receive the bread,

  wish peace, all of the holy dances

  i had never practiced. we rehearsed there,

  played church in my bedroom

  & she was the priest, taught me how to cup

  my hands, how to place it on my tongue.

  finally, i got it down pat, enough to make

  it look like muscle memory & jenna seemed

  regretful, then made me promise to make myself

  believe in it or we’d both be sent to hell.

  ADDENDUM TO NO BAPTISM

  When I tell the story of the slide

  at parties, or poetry readings

  or wherever I might indulge

  in the business of handing over a tale

  as perfect as a clean and burped infant,

  I leave out the ending.

  Know your audience

  is something I hear people say.

  And so I don’t say the part

  where a man saw a child’s

  burning body and announced

  his hand a healer.

  And so, I end the story in my scream,

  not in my silence, facedown

  on a card table in the backyard

  while the next-door neighbor

  hovered his splayed fingers

  above my newborn wound,

  how he promised if I focused

  hard enough, closed my eyes,

  listened to my breath, I would

  feel something. Energy, he called it.

  No need for a doctor, he said,

  and somehow I knew, the sooner I said

  it worked, the sooner he would

  stop floating above me.

  So I swallowed each welt,

  said, All better, and climbed

  from atop the table,

  pulled my dress back over

  my knees and did my best to walk

  with no limp, inside.

  [i dream of knowing the babysitter in her other life. the one where she doesn’t apologize for cursing & shows me where she hides whatever she hides. she gave me a jacket & in it, i found an eighth-grade school schedule, folded & soft from the washer, in the pocket. i kept it in my desk drawer, studied it at night, ran my finger over the class abbreviations, ENG 009, HIS 009, MAT 010, calculated the time gap between each class—seven minutes, how do you get from one end of the building to the other in seven minutes? i coiled & split from the anxiety, grieved for the safety of a single classroom, a teacher who goes by their first name—wanted to ask her so bad how she did it, how she made it out alive, but i didn’t want to give myself away, instead i watch her walk around her bedroom & take notes on the way she moves—precise, everything has a correct place, seems like she’s always cleaning, always putting something away—she’s fast & i wonder how she became that. maybe she always has been, maybe she never had to learn how.]

  ADDENDUM II TO NO BAPTISM

  I should also mention that I don’t know

  if his hands ever touched me, though they did.

  This distorted fact might also be a reason

  I leave out the ending. Another rule

  to good storytelling is that no one wants

  a half-remembered tragedy. You must

  know the width of the knife and how

  it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.

  Maybe he touched me, maybe again,

  maybe that is why for years I wrapped my mouth

  around anything that would fill it

  is not beautiful. It is a bouquet

  of the bitter and half-bloomed.

  Sometimes, the writer in me

  wants to remember just so I can give

  you a story. Sometimes, I think

  the memory will appear in my doorway,

  first a shadow, then a man, stepping

  into the light.

  memory, too,

  lives in my body

  not my brain.

  GAMBLE

  some girls were seasoned in sex,

  visibly bored when the conversation

  lingered around foreplay but never

  nosedived beyond it. some girls

  had done it, but with their boyfriends

  who were still boys & still loved them,

  which made it not count.

  it didn’t matter if you were a virgin

  or not, it mattered how you used it,

  like currency, a sack of nickels

  on the bar top. it was before any of us

  believed we were good at anything,

  so we became good at our bodies,

  at talking about them like we were

  greyhound bitches, lean & itching

  to break through the race gates.

  before either of us had sex,

  jordan & i showed up to the skate park

  in plaid skirts with no panties

  & the boys took turns sticking

  their faces underneath, like small

  children lining up behind a telescope,

  giddy for a suddenly reachable universe.

  jordan brought a disposable camera

  & the boys snapped photos

  of their skirt-submerged

  heads, us with our hands

  over our mouths like amateur

  marilyns, knock-kneed & flustered.

  who knows what we got from it,

  maybe a loosie or a ride or the chance

  to finish a sentence & then took

  the camera to the pharmacy on 4th street,

  where the middle-aged woman

  printed each glossy still & we paid

  in quarters & she didn’t ask any questions

  & we hovered over them, our chests hot and skittish,

  laying the best ones out like tarot cards promising

  a good future. but soon we grew bored of our own faces,

  grew out of our old bodies & threw the photos away

  where my father found them later that week

  & left them on the kitchen table for me to find.

  they looked foreign against my mother’s tablecloth,

  a girl not welcome in this house.

  he pondered over them like a poker deck,

  selected one of me & a headless boy,

  let it dangle between his thumb & forefinger,

  waited a moment for me to drink it in,

  to look myself in the eye,

  & said, who are you?

  MY MOTHER SAYS I WASN’T A BAD GIRL, I WAS JUST BORED

  after Kim Addonizio

  i wasn’t the real thing, the bad girl by instinct

  who wouldn’t even call herself bad because

  that would mean at one point she considered what

  it might look like to be good. i was something

  less lovable—woke up before the bad girl sleeping

  next to me & tinkered wit
h her makeup till noon,

  followed her out the window so i could mimic

  the way she bent her legs, monkey-fucked every

  cigarette so i didn’t get caught fumbling with

  the flint wheel on some dude’s bic. i swung the bat

  in the right direction, undid enough belts

  to fill a résumé right, but i never hailed the ride

  on my own, never instigated the fight, never promised

  a man i was good & meant it. the bad girl calls

  her body what it is—the shit—i called my body

  unfamiliar until it was looked at & then channeled

  everything i’d learned from the bad girl,

  how to arch the back, curl the toes, don’t be ashamed

  of the veins in your neck, she said once, they mean

  you’re feeling something. the bad girl wants everyone

  around her to feel something & she wants to see proof.

  once, we smoked pcp from a dr pepper can

  & lay in the dark, talking about our stomachs.

  she was frustrated that she couldn’t see anything,

  so she had me hold a lighter above my torso

  while she pulled up my shirt & watched as my belly

  rose & fell, each time i breathed her in.

  WITH HER

  We wasted whole days on the 66 bus,

  cruising Lomas for thirty-five cents

  just to remind ourselves, and whoever else

  decided to look, that we were capable of transience.

  But mostly, it was for the air-conditioning.

  Jordan wore long sleeves that summer

  and told the seventh-grade counselor

  that she had fallen into a bucket of knives,

  which, I remember thinking, was not untrue,

  based on the use of the verb fall in other phrases,

  to imply it was not particularly accidental

  but more so situational, like how one might

  fall in love or fall in with a group of bad girls.

  The bus wagged and groaned from my house

  to the park in about thirty minutes, at which point