amateur night in Abbyville.

A Girl of Twenty-four.

This one time in the 80's, some tiny red-headed woman birthed me. I was round. Always round. Fed my mother's milk to the age of two. She tells me stories of how I would hold my breath, just waiting for her to react. The slant of a concerned eye, the rise of a brow, only then would I inhale.

When I was four, we lived in low-income housing. The air now smells like absent fathers and cheap beer. I have learned to keep holding my breath. Sitting on a tire swing in my lilac colored sweat-shirt that showed my belly button. Rainbow colored sandals and all. The watchman.

Then I was ten, just a boy with a bowl cut. I watched a lot of football with my father. I was just waiting for someone to remind me of my hips and breasts. The hidden me behind the oversized t-shirts and Nikes. And they did. I learned the sting of being made to feel less than, small, too big, not enough.

I found them myself. Those breasts, those hips. I am unmistakable. I became a nearly six foot fifteen-year-old with body to spare. I had yet to figure out how to know it, how to own it. I was just trying to stay afloat.

I was 18 when my grandmother died. She told me I was beautiful and left me. The ovaries that created my father only to have created me, they had failed her. They had failed me. I want to know women. I want to be mothered. I locked myself in a room with Ani, Sylvia, Kathleen...I was almost there. I was...learning to be it.

I am it. I am a girl of twenty-four. I am tasting it. I am swinging, belly out. I am a boy with a bowl cut. I am thighs and long limbs and brains. I am my grandmother. I am breathing in.

August 2, 2009