When Lucy Dale is forty-seven, she will be the second victim of an
Unspeakable and portentous horror, half-asleep with only a hamper
Of dirty laundry bearing witness to the brutality of discontent,
For a brief moment she will remember a line in a show she once saw
But didn’t quite understand — a few pompous words about the present
Borrowing from the past, to whom all time belongs — before turning
Her last attention to the tiny window within her bare bedroom,
The stars like silver teaspoons burning holes into black damask —
But for now Lucy is fifteen and we are in her childhood home, where
Lucy peels the wallpaper of the double-wide like an overripe fruit
Imagines the lining like the inside of a stomach or the duplicitous rind
Of the tangerine, porous and slippery with its double-sided shell
And her body the messy pulp, the sensitive tissue kept like a secret.
Lucy is keen to compare herself to something edible or some effervescent
Eden, untouched and inviolable slightly beyond the sight of God,
Some no man's land where no man can stand the sight of her,
Where she breathes and preens like a small bird, her featherlight frame
Fluttering like a television that flickers in the dark —
In the living room, her mother doles out her daughter like a dance card,
Like poker chips to players at a table, this menagerie of men with their
Indefatigable need and easy fistfuls of death — nevertheless,
Lucy remains in her twin-sized bed with the wallpaper that winds
Around her room, as parched as a cuticle and perilously thin.
When Lucy is older, she will leave the double-wide and learn to love the
Roundness of her body, watch it grow fat from daiquiris and fast food,
Welcome its downy softness, how it dampens in the sun — she will
Marry a man whose weight she learns to withstand above her bedframe
Will no longer see the lining of her childhood when she closes her eyes,
And instead feel only the wet green that gladly accepts her feet.