Wallpaper

Turning fourteen without trying to,
or wanting that,
                  half-expecting to inevitably become
the type of person you see on television,
     some woman who cleans the kitchen counters until they shine,
                                         all off-air.

I think I’m finally ready to be young, I tell her,
now that it’s too late,
           now that the world looks something
like she promised. She says, of course you don’t remember
the day you decided to be alive
but you remember perfectly the ones that you didn’t. Because in the worst
of the middle of the night                  the house feels like a thing
you might have re-created
without knowing there was a prior floor-plan.

Of course, the poet drew it first,
dusted it. Even put a doily on it.

Crying in the car I’m trying
to explain what it feels like to have vanished
and then walked for days without having noticed
what you lost or when you lost it.

Of course, the poet wrecked it first,
like you see on TV, with a jackhammer and a broken toilet lid
and chrysanthemums growing out of the cracks.

The poet ate an orange. The poet drank a glass of whiskey.
I watched him, as if by replicating his motions I could pre-date him.

The woman cleaning the counters kept talking.
She had a lot of good points about how much oil to put in a pan
that I hadn’t yet considered,
and I envied her for that.

                    We all became un-hinged.

                                           The poet threw things on the floor. The woman covered the counters
in grease and writhed back and forth, back and forth. A chicken,
waiting for plucking.
The skin of the skin
of the thing.

Dani Smotrich-Barr grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and recently graduated from Wesleyan University. They have had work published by Vagabond City, STORGY, and Cease, Cows, and won the 2020 Dorchester Prize from Wesleyan.