AT 17
I wonder about the masculine
urge to prepare for the inevitable
apocalypse by buying steel bats
and acres of horses, the desire
for inevitability itself,
the engine behind legacy.
By a lake from my childhood
I slipped a boy into my mouth
in the grass in the afternoon
like a dream, like America shot
in the veins at the beginning
of the end. This is history
in my body killing it for fun.
What have we learned so far
from skinny dipping and spinning
doughnuts in the dunes? Church
can be anywhere. My heart belongs
to everyone but me. Mother is a myth
I made myself believe in on nights
I couldn’t fall asleep. Father is future-
less concrete. Last week I bled
in my uniform and left chemistry
early before she got to the elements.
Now I’ll never know the elements.
Oh well. I like to sit in the heavy heat
of the car after everyone else
heads inside. Maybe then
I will teach myself something useful.
Something about becoming.
LEARNING TO EAT MEN LIKE AIR
—title from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath
Three girls in our first apartment.
18 last spring. Believers in the sin
of the flesh. We could recite the book
of Romans while drawing
infinities with our hips. We could tie
a cherry stem with our tongues
into a cross. Freshly liberated, we were
learning the basics: how to separate
lights and darks, how to carry keys
like claws when walking at night,
how to take someone
in our mouths as if we did not
exist. We had boyfriends
like splinters in our hands.
In the dark, a hushed we can’t
but we did, and we didn’t break
or burn. Sucking skin,
we spat them out.
Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington state living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and is the author of the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. She is a winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize with Write Bloody Publishing for her debut full-length collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Pank, The Rebis, and more. Find her on Instagram: @isabellecorreawrites and on Substack: A Poem Is A Place.