Erin Carlyle
Dream Girl
I love a girl who shares my same name. She is all
brown eyes, reads feminist literature, and
writes long letters, and I love the curve
of her Rs and Ss. The boys touch
my hair without my permission—smell
my head, take me
in. I say nothing, smile kindly
at the attention, and sometimes
I even like it, but when she comes
into the room I know what actual
wanting is. I know from the flutter
in my chest and elsewhere in my body. Boys don’t
care to know me like I want to be known: my stack
of CDs, my binder of poetry. Only she reads me,
gives me careful criticism
in the margins. We stay up listening
to music, sharing what we like. Boys don’t know
how to interpret my crowded stanzas, and they don’t
care about music as long as I take my shirt off
and let them fumble with my bra. I help them
with the hook and the eye. I am compulsory.
I do the things with boys I know I should like
even if I’m not really supposed to like it. They kiss
rough, slide off my jeans, heavy bodies sweating
on top of me, delicate
balance of yes and no. I am too young,
but I am also not too young to give it all
away, to let a boy stake his claim.
She doesn’t touch me unless I ask her to.
She does soft circles with her tongue.
EndlessSummer
Cindy says she wants me in the backseat
as we sit on the hood of her dad’s car
listening to CDs. I look up to the darkened
sky, but I can’t see many stars—too much light
pollution. I imagine what’s happening
up there, all those strange forms—hot
explosions, the past. Cindy sits beside me
in her blue bikini and cut off shorts, blonde
curls down her back, and I am wearing her
mother’s old 1960s bathing suit—orange and
brown flowers, little bows on each side, a loan
because I’m too poor to buy my own. I lean in,
kiss her, then look back up to the lie of the sky.
I want you too. Cindy, this moment is gone.
I am writing this from the future. I am in
the future, and I know how stars feel.
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Erin Carlyle lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work can be found in journals such as Arts and Letters, Jet Fuel, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her second collection, Girl at the End of the World, is out now with Driftwood Press. website
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