the girl’s bathroom & other poems

the girl’s bathroom

was only a room—
a room with a sink, a mirror, storage,
toilet, and a walk-in shower which could
also extend itself into an activity space
—and depending on the hour
the bathroom could also be a salon, a greenhouse,
a phone booth, an art studio, a sauna, a stall
for meditation, dark thought. I consulted 
God like Christina folded herself
into a hole in Markyate’s abbey,
but when He got back to me it was through
the weak fan with the hornets jammed 
into the blades: brrr brrr. A catacomb. 
This bathroom is what the royals called
a chamber; this bathroom sounds
like the Chamber of Reflection. I drafted
my best philosophies within this cell
with my back arched, spinal column, 
tossing commas slightly left and
never right. These days I wish I were
a girl in her bathroom with her laptop
pulled up on a blank page and a cursor.
Not even the sunlight under the door
as a timer, or an alarm to her.

1. 1. 1. A sad unicorn surrounded by fence, weld, madder, and woad; 16th-century thread condensed into pixels on posters for college prep workshops.
      2. START YOUR FU     TURE TODAY / REGISTER FO     R FALL 2011 PREP CAMP / AT WW      W.
      3. Go Unicorns, boo St. Poodles—this was a chant, a rallying call for all the extracurricular. A class of a few hundred girls in plaid skirts and polos absorbed into a single entity.
      4. I almost drowned in the deep end, and not even the lifeguard noticed. Drowning inside this school means to squint through the surface and see a unicorn, at times an anthropomorphized caricature, staring back from a plum banner—indifferently.
      5. Buckeye trees, fat lilacs, Painted Ladies: the courtyard. My friends and I collected rainbow pebbles from the mulch before the counselors noticed the gardens bare. Too green, they sighed. 
      6. Jesus was hung in the computer lab, the gymnasium, the food hall, above the Smartboards. A girl in the library told Serena, Keep your thighs crossed for Jesus. The girl held a pious tone. She believed a tampon could tarnish virginity. 
      7. I’d come home singeing with the smells of sweat and metals. Welcome to the next forty years of womanhood, my aunts echoed. Every decade, an unveiled burden. Mom advised: You can only rely on yourself.
      8. The unicorn in the tapestries struggled within a Hortus conclusus, an “enclosed garden.”. It was a hunted creature, backed to the center of a fenced circle.
      9. The girls and I walked to the Franklin Park Conservatory; I took turns leaning my weight into each separate leg. I stopped and checked the sores burning on my soles. Rachel pointed out the tall, marble Mother Mary, erect through the trees, as if surveying her monastery of schoolboys. All this time: the St. Poodle’s campus was a fifteen minute walk through Columbus, and of course their mascot was the cardinal.
      10. An effective dive requires both hands to be angled into a singular point—an instructor described my hands as a horn, then glide through the surface. 
      11. On the walk to Drexel Theater, Serena leaned close to me and asked, Do you want to know a bad word? I made my yes sound experienced. (“Tell me something I don’t know.”) Serena whispered, Shift. It was another word for frustration. Yes, she confirmed, Shift.
      12. I kept it to myself how much I enjoyed the movement of a thin, angular man. (I’m too young to know what Having A Type means—I feel embarrassed about Having A Type, and I keep this a secret this for years.) When he stretches, I slack faint at the slopes formed on his pale sternum, his sharp ribs pronounced through his sweater. I’d release an exhale. Shift. 
      13. Jesus was above a dictionary—he kept a bored stare at the opposite wall. I found the stages of a buckeye tree in the “B” section. The younger buckeye’s spikes seems to be sharp enough to draw blood.
      14. I’m bored enough to conform my spine to the edge of halls. The unicorn tapestry poster above the food hall’s water fountain was torn diagonally. The unicorn shot a frightened expression at the jagged tear.
      15. The surface of pool water highlights the outline of my body. My swimsuit brushes against my chest; I want to press myself in thick bandages and stay flat for another year and maybe the one after because the weight is inconvenient—distracting and incongruent. 
      16. Magic Treehouse Books introduced The Unicorn Rests in a Garden to me at the age of five. Jack and Annie argued if the unicorn should be freed from the enclosed garden and there: my confusion. There was an argument to prolong the beast’s confinement. 
      17. I peeled a green buckeye off its branch and I braced, but the buckeye was fuzzy and easy to press. These are soft. I braced for blood, but all that remained was the delicate texture of their thorns, and it elicited my own indifferent reaction. The danger of the buckeyes’ spikes is dull and disappointing. But I was still young enough to imagine this texture could very much be the same as a unicorn’s horn.