Stargazer Dominique Christina Ashaheed It is the year of living dangerously. I'm sixteen and trying to lose my virginity quickly to someone with soft hands. Eager to let go of makeshift piety I look for psalms in slow dances, tell my nerve endings to be patient, mark my calendar to watch for the subterranean dance of bloodletting and brown skin bending willfully under cotton sheets Hoping this boy has not grown his bones to tools for bludgeoning the few bits of girlishness left in me that have not forgotten what tenderness can feel like in the inevitable cruelty that is adolescence I'm stargazing. There is an unfamiliar tremor in my hip. My navel is a manmade lake. What it cannot hold runs over and collects beneath me. I am glad for the distraction. My hymen applauds the first consensual contact she has ever known. She will begin the arduous ritual of disremembering the one who came before... I'm stargazing. My hands are fisted. This is habitual. It will take years for them to open I will forgive that. He is smiling in my ear. I can hear those pretty white teeth. He did not know redemption could quiver so pink. I did not know redemption could quiver so pink. It's dawn now. And there are a thousand poems waiting in the space between my cheek and his collarbone. I will write them down later. They are mine for the rest of my life. The soft refrains of forgiveness that chase the memories of a pedophile to dust. Come back moon! You and I share the same story! Glory be to the girl who goes back for her body! He will sleep through my epiphanies and hallelujahs. I will forgive that. Unaccustomed to bones being so loose, my knees are waiting for instruction. They have not been told to fight back or fend off. I stroke them into silence. Tell them they are relieved of that duty. This boy is different. A day-walker who laughs in his sleep. My forehead is red from his kiss. Only molested children love so well. Or forget so quickly. He is dreaming now. Left hand pinning me against him safe. He does not know how often I bled in the arms of another. How the scratch and pull of "no" kept daylight from coming. Too short a word for some to hear. It moves through the mouth too quickly to be considered. But I have not uttered that with him. I'm stargazing. I will watch him sleep to the sound of yesterday dying in the bend of his elbow. Whe he wakes he will catch me staring. I am a star. Gazing. -- p2: defenestrate --

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