Back in Dreams
Now that my daughter’s 17 I can’t help but remember
dark days at the end of high school, when, in the filtered
light of massive Mexico City movie theaters, washed
black and white by The
Elephant Man or Saturday Night
Fever, I groped,
innocent, clumsy, with a relative stranger –
no one important, no one I really knew or even cared
to know, or in the backseat of a speeding Rabbit,
three lanes of Chilango traffic zipping past in a stream
of gray exhaust, shoved my fingers into a long-haired boy’s
back pocket, tasting the smoke at the back of his throat,
the whiskey on his unnameable tongue, as he fumbled
under my shirt, chapped palm chafing my new breasts
in their tiny bra. These memories trickle back in dreams,
as if that’s where they must
belong – blurred, partial,
trailing a sense of uncanny danger like a corruptive
perfume, nibbling at the edges of the present moment.
Damn that girl. I want to wake up and shake her images
off. I want to believe she’s a phantom, a dream image,
someone else, alternate reality, not a real rewind girl
living in that teenage metropolis. I want to shake free
of her sullen poems and her silly longings, her need
for love in all the wrong places. I want to be done with
her happy sadness, the taste of foreign mouths, her
angry misapprehensions of sex, sex she can’t get, and
the desperate tides of emotion in her marbled house,
waves that wash her up behind her locked bedroom door.
I want to be done with her harsh laughter and her dirty
jokes. Most of all, I want to disavow all those photos of her:
how she curves into herself as she might into one of those
warm strangers, holding her elbows pinched in her small
hands, her arms pinned against her chest, as if to keep
something precious in, as if to prevent herself from, finally,
exploding into polluted parts.
April 10, 2014
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