Free The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith

1
marine life
     
Pop. 9,762
    Clam season is about to start
    and ninth grade is almost over
    and I have rowed myself
    out to the middle of the bay so I can see the place I live:
    everything is trees and water and rain
    and smoky stink from the paper mill
    and small town, small town.
    One day, I’ll find my way away from here
    and go somewhere real
    and do something great
    and be someone wonderful.
    One day, I will be standing at the shore
    of a completely different body of water
    and it will be big and wild and dangerous
    and it will be like this one
    never even existed.
     
Fourteen
    Fourteen is like rotten candy,
    fourteen is a joke that no one gets.
    When you’re fourteen,
    you look good only once a week
    and it’s never on the day of the dance.
    When you’re fourteen,
    you have a mouthful of metal
    that no one wants to taste.
    Fourteen is going to bed at night
    and wishing you could wake up with a new face
    or a new dad or better yet,
    a new life
    that doesn’t look anything
    like this one.
     
My Sister’s Body
    I have been living in my sister’s room
    for so long,
    I begin to think that
    her body is mine.
    The long torso,
    the breasts lodged high
    like tea cakes
    on her powdery skin.
    In our room
    I watch my sister dash around,
    her lips like bruised plums
    as she waits for Bobby
    to gun up to the house.
    I look at her
    and memorize everything.
    So when the time comes,
    and the boy’s eye glitters like a crime,
    I will know what to do.
    I will peel off my crushed velvet shell
    and stand before him,
    tall and beautiful
    and so white
    he can barely breathe.
     
Pretty
    They say girls take after their mothers
    and in the case of my sister, it’s true.
    But in the case of me
    I have my father’s eyes and my father’s toes
    and scariest of all
    my father’s nose.
    My mother was pretty
    but my father is not,
    so that means whatever beauty there is,
    that’s what my sister got.
     
Diana
    Lips, limes, she had it all
.
    That’s what I say about my mother,
    a dreamboat that drifted away,
    a flower on a live spit.
    She had the beauty of a fire alarm:
    loud and hard to ignore,
    always too late to stop the house from burning down.
    I don’t remember much about her
    just that she was an expert at drinking too much
    and falling down just a little,
    and she always said glass could cut glass,
    a diamond was nothing special.
    The day she left, I was six and learning to swim,
    coasting like a petal in the community pool
    when she came to whisper her last how-to’s intomy ear:
    How to hold the man gently over the flame
    until he is golden as toast,
    how to butter him,
    how to almost gobble him whole,
    when to stop
    and call him
love
.
     
How My Father Sees Us
    To him, we are piles of lingerie.
    We are water-rings and dented fenders,
    we are a trail of CDs littering the road to nowhere.
    Because of us, he’s always on the prowl for chaos,
    a man with a little box for this
    and a little bag for that.
    To him, we are the kinds of daughters that
    make a man want to invent things
    just so they can make their way along.
    He tells us he hopes that when the time comes,
    and with the help of all he’s given us—
    the fishing-lure markers, the toolbox,
    the lectures on which boys are trouble
    and which boys are good-for-nothings—
    we’ll be able to move gracefully
    through the world.
    We will be tidy and professional,
    well organized and successful,
    but what he doesn’t know is that
    we will leave just enough of a trail—
    a stain on the davenport or a chip in the paint—
    so that he can recognize us
    as his daughters,
    so he can seek us out
    and call us his own.
     
Closet
    This morning, Tara catches me
    sneaking into her closet and
    when I ask to borrow one of her shirts
    to wear to the dance this afternoon,
    she tells me she’s not loaning me anything
    and if I ever go in her closet again,
    she will maim me
    and then kill me.
    I ask her what I should wear
    and she says she doesn’t care
    but whatever it is
    it