Laura Page
Gamine as Expired Hallelujah, Jean Pocket Lining, Apostate
i.
The boys sing.
Pert. An androgyny
of inflection, Like halleluiah
with expiration date
and opposite of the old gospel choir.
I sit, one ear to the acoustics,
one eye on an app.
30-something male seeks
20-something female:
—writes of athletic build
to avoid other terms,
—writes outgoing
because he knows better than to write
manic pixie dream girl.
ii.
She’s sloe-eyed
if you consult the web.
Small boned,
resting bitch face.
No, scratch that—
she’s got an up-tick at corner
of nude lip
just bare enough
to be Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Serious eyebrows.
Riccardo Tisci, a designer
at Givenchy, settles
into a home that is said to be
all that—
Audrey Hepburn
with boyish lines—
no,
its minimalism,
a chic practicality.
I resent that false aesthetic.
A true gamine
was me, knock-kneed
and mustached, hawking
Red Hots from the bulk bin
at twelve.
Or even now—
the thumb-burned
jean pocket lining
greasy with Carmex and lust,
remembering the warehouse
and the mattress
and his large,
no—
his serious eyebrows.
iii.
Is God a poet? he asks
and I look at my phone where
lines blur into the shape of him, God,
or just his clavicle
where he’s writing a blason.
No, I say, he’s a poetic
device, and I look at my device,
the screen gone
purple in the next-to-golden hour,
see he’s nose-bent
to that alter too
as the sun smears
psalms and smog, syncing
across the city, across all holy
devices, amen
and amen.
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.