1.19.2021

I was the danger I exchanged

All us girls we agree to be big teen 
islands scouring the slips for who came 
closest. I tented my sour girl with boy-textured 
leans from the could-have bin. Couldn’t let out 
what lived in the back with all the trouble rubbing 
at my tender. A girl’s sight becomes real 
in the flee, her thrum of  identifying marks, 
private seams, marbles of  fat for the pillage. 
I meet myself at every mask collapse. 
Like the old wounds slack on my hiddens I was 
the danger I exchanged for my hair, the song 
I rubbed against my song. 
 
[Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, 'Raw Girl Money', from Poetry (January 2020)]

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