Melissa Roberts
The room feels small or large
depending on how small you are within it
and whether or not a man is touching you
while you're thinking about something else—
*
how the late rain might touch you
or that it's hard to get used to how much
you can see in the dark
*
There comes a time when a girl
must stop wishing herself storybook:
there was no garden before the bitten apple, no
sun-bleached, cartwheeling
summertime
*
Just the usual fumes
breathed down the shirt of childhood
the exposed bulb's available light
*
Doesn't a girl need to learn
sooner or later
to let a man's breath turn her to vapor?
*
The girl is quiet—believing she traded
her voice for passage to shelter
*
So let memory alter it: insist
on recalling other bodies
harmless and pliable as starfish
and kids who jumped off the wooden dock—
happy
*
Pretend that when the sky opens what rains down
will be only rain—
and when it's over the only damage impersonal
as the seasonal flooding
of some murky river
*
That what lands on you hard
might land this time with indifference
Think of the earth unmoved
by the hunger of men trapped in a mine pit
*
men waiting what feels like a long time
for the worst part to be over—
*
in the body, which would have you believe
the world needs another
feeble fortress
*
One day the men are delivered
to the blinding surface
where everyone is rumored to be happy
*
In that kind of light bodies look like apparitions
Like pencil sketches—
*
The girl pretends to sing to herself
She imagines the sound of her own voice
how threateningly it would move
the numb air