flicker

we’re too young and too eager to be watching girls and boys in gold

bodysuits and lace corsets shaking and stumbling across the stage

and our mothers wouldn’t appreciate our purple lipstick and craft store

rhinestones lighting the way down our necks to our collarbones

that boy who thinks he knows how the universe works compared

you to nicotine when he strapped you down to the pages of his notebook

and sold you for a penny per word, and now he’s here smoking girls

by the pack out by the curb and putting them out against the concrete –

an affair that was high risk but low consequence. you hold a dollar bill

between your teeth, gripping washington by the throat and when the girl in

pasties and a stockings and little else brushes your chin, you tell yourself

you’ve found another person to ruin you. you’re part of an eight-eyed

animal clad in velvet and sickly sweet body spray that still burns

the throat worse than the lukewarm liquor you kept in a water bottle.

we’ve had our share of filthy dogs following us into bathrooms or worse,

tearing deeper holes in our shredded tights, so by now we’ve learned how

to slink back into the night like amorphous shadows you’ll see flickering

beneath street lamps out of the corner of your eye and mistake for haunts.

we’re just kids trying to save our parents another nightmare.

--Serena Devi