Girlhood's Dinner Before Seventeen
If I died, let me die with my hands soaked in her blood. I wanted her blood, and plenty of it. That is the way I went into the fight, and that is the way I fought it
— Zora Neale Hurston
what can endure
a summer with a carnivore?
when the cold has left
to whiten the moon, my heartbreak thaws
and so, the sweat
between my body and the steel wall
flirts with red.
the man on the subway has slender hands,
that shake under the weak light.
The car is accelerating again.
I don’t mean to stare at him
but his eyes are paralyzed moons,
an Ivan reborn, against the streaking cityscape.
I can imagine his sinewy palm
covering a spear-wound on the side of his son’s head.
​
Ghostly figures take shape in my peripheral vision,
everything is heating up.
June has given in
too easily to old age, spinning gossamer
around the evening sun.
I push Repin out of a window
and make my man the protagonist,
he has more colour
and fear.
I have lost myself so swiftly that
| the orcas that shift
in the firmament of the sea
threaten even the sun:
let me eat you,
let me eat you whole.
the beachgoers have been rounded up
and warned by police helicopters.
the orcas take this summer as theirs, then |
everything is heating up.
| even the temperamental and intoxicated
on the subway
shift uncomfortably under my gaze |
I take this summer
as mine then.
Written by Anushka Roy