CHAIR (French, flesh)

When I try to tell you how a body becomes ceded ter­ri­to­ry I could

start by telling you I can’t leave the car’s heater at 69 degrees.

Or it’s my mind.  The numbers between 72 to 74 are 

prob­lem­at­ic also, that’s when men first noticed my breasts and told me

while I strode gleam­ing from the lake at dusk or some­times even

under the flu­o­res­cent lights in the halls at school, that weird fizzy

hum atop every­thing, male bodies below like blunt force

pushing towards history or math, elbows

sharp as the symbol for angle in my side

after the laugh­ter.  Pity is a pretty flower with a weak stem though, every

girl can tell a version of this story, how her body tried to be a garden

but became a pulpy cat­a­logue instead, not even glossy, that anyone

could get and paw through, licking their fingers to turn the pages.

The first time I had sex (’77) the boy

said it was like moving fur­ni­ture.  He said it with a kind of

exas­per­a­tion, like he’d expect­ed an expe­ri­ence of grace and instead

got a storage unit he had to fill without pay. Later,

he put his hand on the back of my neck and pushed down hard

and when I real­ized what he wanted me to do I think my mid-century

self, simple, func­tion­al and with a muted grain

did what he wanted but retreat­ed further

into my rococo mind, leaving the planks of my body behind.