I am less flimsy than boys think.
I can stand up with some help. I can raise my hand,
my glass or my bangle or my japonaiserie fan,
though never all four at once. I know
the name of the artist who made me and made my hair,
with its scribbles and angles, and my other hair,
with its Byzantine curves and its coils, and my other hair,
that I wore when I was a flapper. I have been cut out,
refolded, unfolded, and put back into a folder;
I have been lost and found and lost and found.
Someday I will be left in a cardboard box,
the kind loosely associated with shoes.
Should I fear scissors, or love them? Once
I was colorless, I was self-consciously artistic,
I was a fluster magnet, I was scared.
I rang my new telephone. I was the belle of a ball
where even the gloves were bell-shaped. I could not hear.
I did not look like me at all.
A pencil mark grazes my ankle. A chestnut
stallion, tilted an inch off the vertical,
propped on three out of four legs, watches over me
from the jury-rigged off-white lean-to of an envelope
that serves him as a bedroom or a stall.
What if I had a side you could not see?
Once I was interchangeable, then I was loved,
and now I am not so sure. I have been upside down,
my face in thick carpet, in coach and spring-wheeled trap,
my ballet shoes, riding boots, and brickle-edge tap
shoes circled around me. None of it hurt.
I fear misadventure, and yet I would like to be shown.
I fray and sag in my thick bustle, my tan riding skirt,
my mythical petticoats. Maybe I’ll never leave home.