Laura Page
Gamine as Pasiphae, Ruben’s Auto Body
I’m stockinged in moss and bane,
resisting murals and gaskets,
and Pasiphae sits on the balls of her feet,
grease under her fingernails, lactating
for the muscular chassis, all gutterlight, haloed,
all harnessed in spider nurseries.
I’m all understory, lumps
of charcoal between my bare toes, scoring
bread songs, drawing fawns in the greenest
emergencies. She’s elbow deep
in pistons,
paper transistor mouth radios,
wearing Carhartt’s,
an asymptote of lace
with a vague scree of rust in the crotch
that will not translate the Minotaur.
Author’s Note: This poem is part of a series of poems addressing the cultural tropes surrounding young women who fit the description of “gamine,” or “tomboy,” physically and/or sexually. It was my intention, in these poems, to interrogate and critique a specific way our society labels women and girls.
Laura Page is the author of epithalamium, selected by Darren C. Demaree as the winner of the Sundress Publications 2017 chapbook contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, The Fanzine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Human/Kind, Bone Bouquet, The Hunger, Maudlin House, and other publications. Page, also a visual artist, lives in the Pacific Northwest, and is founding editor of the poetry journal Virga.