diseases

The women on the street corners are dying and dreaming
of feather beds and eyes that don’t look so hollow,
the car windows rolling down to let in the thick evening air
smell familiar, like alcohol and smoke.
Their wrinkles are reading like poetry,
their insides rotten and resilient like cancer.
The girls I knew in middle school are crossing the street,
their nails shining in color like gasoline in the sunlight,
waiting to find themselves at the bottom of their Marc Jacobs’ Daisy.

They were stronger than I was,
I cried more often and forgot to put sugar in my tea,
carried my self loathing under my tongue where they kept
their self control and their Listerine,
lips painted, nails painted, ravish-me red. 
I’ll always try to be smooth, but my personality is like sandpaper,
I am blistery, I am hoping that confessing this will turn the sores
into tough skin, a guitar player’s calloused fingers.
I never got into boys. I never stopped being bitter.
I’ve never paid for Seventeen, but it’s still dutifully
on my doorstep every month, like an invitation, like a symptom.

I don’t know how to tell what’s a symptom,
it’s so hard to tell which of us are diseases.
Everyone’s part of some goddamn plague.

A woman on a street corner once called me angel,
smoke rising from her lips, all sun-leathered skin.
I felt the blisters forming from the friction, raw
with the tenderness of new mosquito bites.
I don’t have a cure, only the kiss she blew me,
only the hope that today, I’m not feeling like it’s terminal.