My friend Sheila loved
to make our Barbies and Kens
grind their hard plastic bodies
together like cogs that didn’t fit.
She knew where babies came from
and told me a story so unbelievable
that I begged her for it again and again,
my eyes narrowed, my mouth contorted
the way it shapes around the taste
of milk a week past its due date.
But one night the click of the door
closing behind the babysitter’s good-bye
roused me like a clock set for puberty,
and I listened for the tinkle of ice in a glass
that marked my mother’s progress up the stairs
with a new boyfriend from the bar.
Her bedroom door cracked open
the width of an eye. I watched
as my mother and the stranger
grabbed each other, ferocious
and urgent. They groaned and humped
like the neighbor’s dogs.
And yet I could not deny the seed of a stirring,
a tingling like a finger dug too far
into one’s own navel. After they collapsed
on the bed like deflated balloons
I crept back to my room,
newly edged and foreign.
Bonnie Nevel is a wetland biologist and freelance editor living in Washington, D.C.
