THIRTEEN

At the campground, I enjoyed the ocean, hot dogs, and flirting
with danger—letting the older teenage boys touch my legs
in the rec hall, wearing a reckless bikini, my new small boobs.

My anxiety rose like a pubescent pimple as my family
slowly became alien to me, their public humiliations
at the McDonalds drive-thru, a unanimous silence over
fast food fish strips and the evening news.

At the Shop Rite, my mother paid for the pot roast with
a paper check—her elegant penmanship and halter top
seducing the checkout clerk while I pocketed
at least two packs of Juicy Fruit.

I locked my bedroom door and laid in my bed with four pieces
of gum in my mouth and a pillow up my nightgown.
I found comfort in that pregnancy while my old blonde dolls
languished in a broken bassinet.

My hands, with no prior knowledge, found their way down
my pants and admitted private pleasure. Thirteen is no age
to be a woman, despite the fits of tears and unfamiliar bleeding.

At the end of summer, I raked a path through the woods,
sorted stones into rectangular beds. I liked to think
that was as much a home as the house up the hill,
clearing those loam floors, leaning fallen branches into quiet huts.

I wrote my name in the dirt with a stick. I nursed a chipmunk back
from my cat’s attack, stroked his striped bitten mass. I collected
salamanders from beneath an  old wagon wheel— their cold
bodies and their simple, dark lives.  My own life,
simple still, just beginning to darken.