The hard work of appearances disappears
into the apparent effortlessness, and the loose three-quarter sleeves
of trying to become what other
people, your friends, your real friends, are convinced that you already are,
like trying to follow the pale fleck of a small plane,
or a big plane far away.
Sweatshirts big enough to hide half a person
hide behind their modular words,
and leggings. Where two or three strangers gather
together, sandbar: we are migratory birds,
temporarily almost aloft, almost fluorescent, in a 1983
of lemon-yellow possibilities,
things I might very insistently wish to be.
Only an eyelash separates me from reason,
from the coveted role of pretty-to-geeky liason.
To be good, to be
a good girl, is to pile up
credit you have to use up
before nobody else remembers you earned it.
There was a lesson in variability here, and in the history
of stencils, but I am not the girl who learned it.
When I got here first I looked around, and around.
I would like to compare my own growing up
to sand, and you and you to solid ground.