Because I could not get the face of the clock above the fridge
to reveal its secrets (its needled hands pointed to nothing
more prophetic than now or later), I chose to live
without time. Things would happen when they happened.
There were, after all, many things to be frightened of: Killer Bees
from South American, Hell’s Angels
from Oakland, rising voices on the other side
of the bedroom wall.
Because boys had it easy and were allowed to command
their bodies and not the other way around, I ignored boys and chose to live
without them for as long as I could. They were, after all, only interesting
as men.
Because I thought that every ten-year-old lived
with two languages swirling above her head, I ignored my mother
on the phone to her sisters, my grandmother’s mid-sentence switch
from English to Spanish,
the cacophony of conversation at every Sunday dinner. Let them speak
the language I had no use for.
There were, after all, many ways to speak, I knew this already; a look
shot across the dining room table, the slight turn of a body
when passing in the hall, the way a head was held
in the long silence of the car.
Because I was allowed to wear jeans to school only on Wednesdays,
I ignored my mother’s rule and snuck them
in my backpack, changed in the tight stall of the girl’s bathroom.
Its antiseptic floors too close for comfort.
I was, after all, not the skirt and blouse kind of girl. It did me no good.
She found out anyway—followed me home one afternoon, confronted me
at the screen-door, her face a shadowy patch of features.
Because, lying in bed at night the adult voices hovered like cartoon bubbles
in the space between the ceiling and my face,
blurry and nonsensical, I ignored them and stopped trying
to comprehend. Instead, I deemed their words
a dead language. I had, after all, become a palindrome to them,
the same thing backward as forward.