Molly Kat

LUCY: OCTOBER 16TH

Her hands are shaking. The hallway smells like old garbage and the culmination of three different dinners. Her pants are too baggy and too short, she thinks tonight could be the night. She makes him come upstairs. She fumbles through her drawers, picks out the blue dress that snaps down the front, comes down to her knees and looks like the cartoon character, Madeline. She wishes she had a little yellow hat with a black ribbon. She can't stop thinking about your green jeep, your hands over her ears. She thinks only in images, rough dramatic sketches through a fish eye lens. She sees you grab her face, pull it to yours, kiss her so hard her bottom lip cracks open. She is thirteen. She wants to know what love is, she has cut out the centerfold from her father's playboy and Elmer's glued her face to it. The rickety cinematography of flashback pans out, the jeep starts rocking. She stares at the burnt out "O" in the bowling alley sign. She tries not to zoom back into the rear window, doesn't want to watch you fuck her mouth like it was one of those silicone women in the sex shops. She is pinned under your body. Her throat hurts. She can barely breathe. The back seat is snuffed out as she scrunches her eyes shut, exhales audibly, and grabs her black boots from the crevice of the couch. She still has the newspaper clippings from two years after she graduated High School. You, in the green jeep, raped three girls. They were afraid to press charges, afraid they'd be pressed under your body again, were afraid their bodies had begun to sprout mushrooms and quills and bulls eyes. She wishes she would have had the sense to bite down. She grinds her teeth in her sleep, can never remember the nightmares by morning. She has gotten used to clammy skin and wet cheeks. She is in love with the heartbeat of an irregular man. She made him walk through garbage and three stories of dinners and told him to bring the wine. She didn't tell him 'tonight is the perfect temperature to overdose" she didn't say 'I know exactly how many Xanax I can dissolve in Cabernet to coma myself into sanctuary". All she said was "girls only talk to me when I wear sweatpants and my big knit hat. I gained four pounds since San Francisco. Life is a white circus tent, collapsing...all the women I know are inside."

Molly Kat is finishing her Masters degree in English Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University, where she is the poetry editor for Harpur Palate. These two pieces are excerpts from a longer manuscript entitled Lucy. Other Lucy poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blind Oracle, Foothill, Corvus, Toad Suck, Samizdat, Up the Staircase, Resurgo, Spark Bright, A Minor, Off Channel, H_NGM_N, and Toad the Journal. Four of the poems from this manuscript were finalists in the Midwest Writing Center's national poetry contest. Molly travels the world couch-surfing and accidentally finding new and bizarre ways to get concussions.