we’d said. At an age when we could not yet pronounce collage,
we were taught to glue glitter, eggshells, and feathers on paper
as if to make up for mornings we’d sweep like dustballs under
our beds. Obedience was our pledge in wobbly cursive, never
going beyond margins others had inked in red. Then one of us
tried to gather silver globules of guilt on the kitchen counter,
faked fever erased by the thermometer bursting in boiling
water. The nuns nodded off years later, oblivious to the
swelling under out tetoron blouses. We learned to snicker at
them, at puddles under their arms, under sleeves like hefty
wings. They never saw us hatching, never heard the lipstick
twists, the tongues swirling in each other’s mouths, our
coughs around the first cigarette somebody had stolen from
her mother’s pack. After graduation, someone told of the arch
of a fortuneteller’s brow that meant, There is little that is innocent
about you. That gesture was the signal. We fluttered
apart, forgetting family names, then first names, never talking
about what came after: the gasps wemasked as bliss during our
separate rupturings, our skins articulate under so much
weight—or the trembling of lovers’ lower lips across tables
while we fumbled with our histories. Perhaps only our hands
grow more fluent with age, leaving fingerprints on glasses
someone else will break.
First Place (I)
Hart House Poetry Contest