The winter her body no longer fit, walking felt like swimming in blue jeans
and a flannel shirt. Everything stuck to her skin: gum wrappers, Band-Aids,
leaves. How she envied the other girls, especially the kind who turned into
birds. They were the ones boys hand-tamed, training them to eat crumbs from
their palms or sing on cue. What she would have done for a red crest and a
sharp beak, for a little square of blue sky to enter her like wings. But it
was her role to sink so the others could rise, hers to sleep so the others
could dance. If only her legs weren't too sodden to lift, if only her
buttons were unfastened by the water she kept swimming through, and she
could extract from the shadow of her breasts a soul as soft as a silk
brassiere, beautiful and useless, like a castle at the bottom of the sea.
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The Prose Poem