First stacked heels, first gold hoops, first sexy
skirt, green and diaphanous wraparound
Danskin skirt meant for my ballet class,
first junior high school dance, first pulsing bulbs
and loud familiar music loosening limbs
to moves I’d only practiced with a girlfriend;
Does this look okay? Is this cool? Or dumb?
Not wobbling between confidence and shame.
Stabs of excitement walking in the gym
darkwashed from pristine bleakness to a den
of red light, strobe light, eleven and twelve year-olds
finding themselves, like me, in their new skins
of carnal creatures in a blurry realm,
a place that in our minds could writhe with vipers
or blaze with stars. We were the epic heroes
in an adventure just shoved off from shore
or else we were little specks inside a beaker
who’d rearrange, assimilate, and die.
First practice stopped, to lose track in the end
of how I wanted to look and begin moving
freely and indiscreetly to the BeeGees,
Marvin Gaye, Santana, the Eagles, Chic.
By song two, I’d wiped out all thought of home,
the port that, dazed and sweating, I’d return to,
a Persephone who wanted to stay with Pluto:
changed on the inside, ready to leave her mother
without a word or tear. I was that young
and unentrenched, first body’s pull that strong.