Before I knew myself, uttered out loud the words
labeling me a this or a that or a who knows?
I developed feelings for a wounded eye girl
we were kids really, dressing up as Japanese geisha in my room
all festooned in asian print and a little tea set I got for cheap
from china town
we wore chopsticks in our hair and bowed ceremoniously
singing the only song we knew in Japanese
with The Mikado playing in the background
I liked her thin arms and her prominent nose
her knock knee urchin look and bandaged soul
I liked how strong she was even as she looked like she’d fly away
most of all I was attracted to her wounded eyes
for there is something heady and bewitching in
pain
and its infinite manifestations
we’d dress up, I would paint her lips scarlet, we’d put on
funny accents and roll on the floor looking up at glow stars
I still had stuck there with movie posters of vampires
she would fling her arm out across my chest, tell me of herself
pouring out the suffering of her short life
and it was an awful life before she was
brought to this city we lived in, both from somewhere else
transplants, orphans, ghosts of ourselves with missing DNA
she would tell me of her homeland, how
her father beat her black and blue for
being a girl
why as she got older he took
each of her sisters one by one
and they didn’t come back
whole or even
well repaired
I wanted to lick the pain from her cheeks and hold her to me
until the wound healed
but nothing I could ever do would assuage
the wounds behind her dark brown eyes
so we played as little girls do
building camps and tepees and western saloons
once I played a prostitute and she a cowboy
I cocked my head, snapped a red garter and asked her;
want to have some fun soldier?
she laughed, such a lovely laugh
her black hair and coffee skin, shining with fantasy
she didn’t like being herself anymore than me
we got into our pretend saloon bed
I served her a pretend shot of whiskey
acted ‘saucy’ the way I had learned from TV
she rolled her eyes laboriously like a comedian winking
pulled up my petticoats which were real
and at one point had been my mother’s wedding dress
when she married my father, bare foot and broke
with a velvet ribbon tied around her neck
and our fingers explored each other
as we giggled and changed our voices to all the favorite
TV characters we knew
I think I even tried to be Sue Ellen
I wanted to tell her then, not to stop
to press my mouth to her pomegranate lips
touch her swelling breasts with my own lack of
run myself like a cat across her saffron skin
but even then I knew
damage makes bad bed fellows
we soon changed the game, to cops and robbers
climbing out of the window, swinging from trees
though in every story
there was an element of romance
I thought of the old shows I loved
where the actors were always
dancing around the circumference
of each others heart
how in real life sometimes they married
I told my father; Oh see! Oh see! pretend things can come real!
but some cannot
and she and I grew up
once she told me she had always known I felt like that
I blushed dark red because of course
thinking I’d been subtle when watching her changing clothes
she married a blonde haired man and moved to Australia
had a little boy and hopefully
a ceasing of her alotment of pain
because more than anything I wanted that for her
even more than the beautiful moment
of two girls
laying in sunlight
laughing at imagined things
for the rest and peace and escape
of anything real
