.

Of all things one could be open about,

who had a guru or when was a first time

you felt a kind of femininity and wanted to cut it off.

One with ruffles and polka dots,

a cotton/acrylic/polyester blend,

blue and white prom dress from the 70’s.

It was your mother’s,

you found it in one plastic bag in her old room,

one of those things that was never thrown out for some reason,

apparently pregnant with meaning.

You wore it for a costume to a middle school dance

until you hid in the bathroom having discovered

it was actually a costume of some kind of horrible womanliness

that made your cheeks bright red as your mother’s when she drinks,

or as your own sometimes when you do.

A blush of femininity that feels so embarrassed it is gross.

Later you stepped on the dress on the dampness of the basement floor,

slept on by the cats and full of centipedes.

Of all the things one could be open about,

sex and text messages from however many boys,

dropping cell phones off the bleachers,

kissing and holding hands.

Wanting to hide in the sheets alongside a lover

in the lightning lit room of an apartment

where you live alone for the first time in years.

You smell the aloneness,

you hear it between cracks of thunder.

What it means to hold hands? To kiss another?

To eat? Or to make dinner?

You texted him and he didn’t respond.

You touched him and he came in you,

he grabbed you with his legs and

you felt yourself longing to hide in the cave

his body made folded around yours.

Coming out into the light,

you see landscape of trees split down the middle,

halves arching away from each other,

branches down in the leaf dirt.

Everyone bikes the streets taking pictures.

There is the homeless man, the one everyone knows.

He is out early, you see him in the morning.

You would say hello to him but suppose it would be too much.

You wonder where he slept during the storm,

if he slept at all, and

you wonder if you already said too many words just by thinking them.

You try to sort them but they just accumulate like leaves

rushing up against a gutter,

mashing together,

evening out into little river currents with sideways glances

that run along. Wildly attracted,

you open your mouth and let some out and

close your mouth once you’ve let too many out and judgment

clings to you like polyester polka dots.

You wonder if you have to cut it

like your great grandmother did one day in the nursing home

when she was ninety two and could not remember how to unzip her dress.

You tell yourself you will not tell anyone else

anything else anymore ever again.

You realize you really like it without the lights on,

no television or reception,

with the trees blown down and the dark streets,

with houses dark,

the power out,

to walk alone in a city in

your dirty jean shorts and shitty t-shirt,

wet your sandals and get yourself wet

in the wet grass, as wet as you want it wet,

your skin free from the sticky heat

of all the things one could be

open about.

It feels like the day after the end of the world,

maybe just the morning after,

stormed land breathing its whole body

arches and collapses, you touch the world’s chest,

and you press its belly to your knees.

rokuro taniuchi

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