BANG OUT

“There’re horse bones in the water.”

She says cool and simple,

watches white Friesians leap overboard

in this PBS enactment of the Spanish Armada.

Folds her legs and pulls on her polka-dot socks,

she’s in shorts and this is the first time

her woman charms me, even if she becomes

that stone, picked from sand, washed

over and over, she calms me.

My skin to her skin is not enough—

orchestrated bumping into and draping onto,

spooning during sleepovers,

huddling when scary movies are on—

I need closer, an infrastructure to get there faster.

I’m her best friend from next door.

The boys, I envy who get to take her

on the roof and kiss; she lets them

put hands up her shirt. She smiles,

grown and fresh, her eyes sink

into him pressed on her,

he wanting all the bases.

Everyone says she is bad and up to no good—

her mother, mine, her family, mine, the pastor;

the chatter is the shame in themselves,

lets them turn eyes blind to the brother

who sneaks into her bed.

I do my homework at home;

I’m too much into her plus me,

the ballet she learns at the community center,

her pink leotard; her scent stronger than before.

She is beautiful as all things are

when time is taken to come by

after school, sing high-pitched with the radio,

to listen by the window when her mother’s

beating her again. Every door is slamming.

She’s fed-up and cries on the 6th floor landing;

she’s running away again.

I love her

and if a wish was between us,

I want her to have the longer end.

Copyright © Arisa White, 2010