Perugia Press
Celebrating poetry by women since 1997

To The High School Prom Queen

There’s just one highway. The wind rears up like a circus beetle.
The setting sun hangs purple tags on the mountains

as if night were for sale too. Las Vegas tilt o’ wheels
its neon legs toward the desert —

humming seamstress of broke down and ritz
tacking embroidery floss and velvet swag on everything.

You are there, in the Women's Correctional Institute,
sleeping on a cot in a former storage closet.

Miles away, snow wriggles through dune and pine.
Pork chops thaw in my sink; potatoes boil on the stove.

You behind a bar-pull of stars, sky-wandering
and homeless without the concrete hooks of a city.

You on the streets, cash-wadded and meth-loaded.
You, knocking out someone's teeth.

Dear friend, I have finally stopped trying to kill myself.
Sometimes the light comes in tiny points,

shark-toothed and smaller than stars;
sometimes, it sprays over everything.

Every day my scars shrivel up — lids of rain
in a garbage can. Once I wanted to travel.

Now I’m in love with the way whole Saturdays
weigh on my back with laminate flooring and wood piling.

My girlfriend and I throw chops on the grill,
fat floats above the trees. Shaken,

sometimes the stars, the pine needles spiral gracefully.