Friday, August 31

The worst part of working fast food is the name tag


because there’s always somebody’s mom with coupons

who thinks they are somehow being cheated by the teenager

at the register, and their eyes always dart down

to your chest to look for a way to be in charge.


“Listen,” she says, and I see her eyes laser in,

search out my name.

“Alicia. You overcharged me for my mozzarella sticks. Now,

do I need to ask for the manager or are you going to make it right?”


Make it right. Ever since last year, everything

sounds like justice or

its burning absence.


She thinks she’s been done grievous wrong

by the two dollars extra on her waxy receipt

and my mouth is supposed to be apologizing

but my mind is on everything else:


• the whole school/world calling me a whore

• Sarah cutting me out of her life like a tumor

• my parents, the wood chipper of their life between them


In the end I just say, “Ma’am, I’ll do my best.

I’ll do my very best.”


We both know

she’ll still call the manager over,

will still make the world a witness

to all the things she thinks she deserves

even with my smile so bright

it shatters.


It’s my last weekday shift before school


and it’s just girls on the clock, no creepy manager,

no too-old guys pretending they’re still in high school

and eyeing you over curly fries.


Slow day. No construction workers,

no cops expecting free food,

no guys in suits who refuse coupons

because they want you to know

they’re rich:


just teenage girls who don’t go

to the same school,


carrying different gossip

not about each other

and thus unimportant.


Stephanie is the shift manager

and she’s only twenty-one so

when there’s no customers

she lets us turn up the lobby music

and all of us sing along.


The final day of August is like a guillotine


separating September from the rest of the summer

in one clean slice, the red sun bleeding out

over my feet as I circle the school

in my Meat Palace uniform

one more time before I start junior year.


It’s empty. No one but me

would ever come to school while the freedom

summer drops like gold confetti

still sparkles on our shoulders.


But I like it like this, the quiet, the way

the beige bricks drink up the sunset,

taking on a color that reminds me

of a desert. Dry, baked,

vicious.


I’ve never been anywhere but here.


My feet take me to the track, like they miss it.

Maybe they do. Maybe they remember

how it felt to transform

from girl to mustang

with grateful lungs heaving.


Freshman year

I could fly.


Then sophomore year happened.


I look back at the pink bricks,

settling into a deeper shade

now that the sun is sinking.


I’m sinking too, down onto the bleachers,


the metal warm against my thighs.

This school is empty of people

and full of memories

and I don’t want

any of them.


My mother offers to iron my school uniform and even though I want her to, I say no,


because sometimes

in this place

where I am


it feels good to refuse

help, because saying yes

to even something like an iron


feels like saying yes

to everything else


when my whole life

has become a pipe bomb

full of pieces

that explode in a furious

no.


Tuesday, September 4

The school bus stops on my block but I don’t get on.


I’ve been taking the city bus all summer

and I like the way it makes me feel

like I’m living in a different world

than the people who are supposed to be

my peers. What’s the difference?


At least on the city bus

I can pull the string,

and it makes me feel

like I’m in control.


I can get off whenever I want

wherever I want

even if my destination

is predetermined.


On the city bus I can still wonder

what the people there think about me,

whereas at school

once I walk through the door

I already know what they’re all thinking,

what they’re all going

to say

about all the versions of me they think they know,

laid alongside

all the girls I was before

in stark contrast.


Flashbacks


They are like ripples on a pond and they begin

in my earliest memories of myself:


Playing in the fountains at Elwain Park

with no shirt on, five-year-old bird

chest


Eight and pointing at bras in Target, my brother

wearing them like hats while my mother

shopped and I laughed


Sarah getting her first bikini, me ten

and silent and feeling a brand-new envy

grow in like ivy


Me eleven

Me twelve

Me thirteen

Me fourteen


Curious and curious

Me warming up

Me sneaking to buy my first thong

Me excited for someone

anyone

to notice


Me kissing Michael Strong

the day I got my braces off

just to feel what someone’s tongue felt like

sliding across new teeth


Me hearing about what good girls

do and think and say

and always feeling like a neon opposite

even if only in shadow.


Me thinking I had secrets until last year

when I learned what it meant--

what it really meant--

to hide.


There’s always a white kid who says “Why do the Black kids sit together in the cafeteria? They segregate themselves.”


And I’m a white girl too so what do I know

but I think the answer is so obvious in a school as white

as this one

where Halloween parties still feature blackface and redface

where the student council only barely voted

(5–6)

to maintain a special events calendar for Black History Month

and the cheerleading squad is all white but shouts yas queen, werk! between routines.


Dawn of Day 1

and we’re all in the cafeteria waiting to be dismissed,

the swell of the student body heaving as if on a ship at rough sea,

all of us deciding where we fit, where to squeeze in, if anyone we hate or love

has rendered certain sections unsittable.


The girl who says it this year is skinny and blond,

a sophomore, and her whole table murmurs and laughs,

casts glances at the three tables where the couple dozen Black students,

the half-dozen kids from Mexico and El Salvador,

all take refuge in each other’s presence.


Why wouldn’t they


when to sit anywhere else in this sea of narrowed eyes and fake laughs

would be like throwing yourself overboard?


I’d never say that I consider my pain equal

but I can say I know

how it feels to step onto a ship

and be confident that everyone on board

is watching you, thinking that you’re not a sailor

but a creature from the deep.


The only text messages I get are from coworkers.


Mariah: can you take my shift tomorrow

Alicia: what time

Mariah: 3:30

Mariah: . . . ?

Alicia: I’m in school, sorry. Yes I’ll take it.

Mariah: I thought you were dropping out

Alicia: I wish


And from random dudes.


Him: Thinking about you

Alicia: I know what that means

Him: yeah;)

Him: free tonight?

Alicia: tomorrow


Day 1 was a success


in the way that surviving a haunted house

is a success:


I walked through the halls and saw

lots of ghosts


but never

the Devil

himself.

The garage is full of smoke


and someone who doesn’t live in this gray

house might think something is on fire.


If they looked closer they would know nothing

is, the smoke they see only the last remains

of what has finally ceased to burn. What’s left

of my family is a cold smolder. Divorce

is only white-hot for so long. If you’ve ever watched a fire

you know it eventually gives way to a gray zero,

smoke coming from nothing, piles of ash.


The smoke is my mother sitting in a lawn chair

cigarette in hand, coffee can next to her for the ashes.

She talks to her mother

or her sister

sometimes a friend from college

and from where I stand in the kitchen

I can hear the low blur of her voice,

the clink of the can when she taps,

the slide of a beer across the concrete.

It’s only the two of us.


My brother and my father have become

heavy apparitions. They exist but on a different

plane. My mother is here with me but she’s

also somewhere else--on nights like tonight

the garage is a distant universe

I would need time travel to cross.

Sometimes I stand at the door and try to listen

while my leftovers spin in the microwave.


Occasionally she laughs,

but mostly she cries.


My parents met when my father was still...