Thirteen
Thirteen & pigtailed, silver neckchain at night by a lapping lake,
I’d agreed, met you there, rough towel on a hard dirt path,
pointed stone bled into my shoulder blade, but I’d consented, confusing,
a permutation of permission,
the strange faith of a dazzlestruck kid:
that nothing could be taken, only given.
That last second, when everything was mine,
I brimmed, a tender pitcher of water on that dirt path,
water that should have been poured, not spilled
for a man who should have been a boy.
Over me your shoulder ate a square of moon,
but left enough light to milkwash me.
Only two moons in, I was milk & blood, forbidden,
too new to know how to become a tree,
so arose instead, a mist on the lying air,
leaving my pink body behind,
the silver chain falling in the lake’s green murk,
falling slow & slowly falling, its tiny heart charm
caught in one last spike of light.
.
Catherine Gewertz has been a garage band singer, pie baker, cocktail waitress and newspaper reporter. She loves a nice turn around the two-step floor and a glass of Bourbon, neat. She’s an inaugural member of Pride Poets, a troupe of queer poets who compose on-demand poems for strangers on the streets of Los Angeles, using vintage typewriters. Catherine is a graduate of Stanford University. Her work appears in Raw Art Review, True Chili, Altadena Literary Review, and Metro Weekly.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 