Samantha Duncan

COLOR WHEEL

My friend's older sister gives us makeovers. Newly hatched JTT and Jason Priestley stare from her wall, tanned and dimpled, thrust from apple pie. For the first time, an awareness of my naked face. Fearing she will poke my eye, I'm opted out of eyeliner, and no foundation because, well...

a deep well in which I play Dream Phone, for a distraction from the all those white boys in the real world that will never call. In our nest of magazines, I can't find one with 5 MAKEUP TIPS FOR NOT-SO-LIGHT FACES! I need it like Scott and Matt need 5 CAREER PATHS FOR DREAM PHONE GUYS! My confusion breakout requires a foundation I can't borrow from the dark well.

Sparsely made over, I'm a red-lipped rodent, colored between the lines. The pinup boys align their admiration to my friend's landscape, her voyager face, their heads identically tilted at forty-degree-angles to home and forever apple pie, to blonde ambition and a slow-motion bruise.

Samantha Duncan's newest chapbook is The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, Posit, and Menacing Hedge. She serves as Executive Editor for ELJ Publications and reads for Gigantic Sequins. She lives in Houston and can be found at planesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com and @SamSpitsHotFire.