The Girl She Used to Be
/Aileen Bassis
Once she longed for a drawer filled with every color.
Once she stole a toy ring and chewed its plastic nub.
Once her dreams were motionless as summer heat.
Once she walked through an empty lot to train tracks
disappearing along the road and she
didn’t know why they went or how
crushed weeds gathered clouds
into her mind and she crossed
avenues twisted into shapes
that had no tongues and she never told
about the stairwell or who was waiting there
and she never coiled tight inside a sound
that was just for her but found
herself in a window’s dust at night
when the curtains twitched
alive and whispered — stay awake.
She wanted to be breath between a window
shade and the pane of glass while a feeling
that she couldn’t name slid inside
her like two arms
pushing into sleeves
and when she held a baby whose fingernails
were sharp as his mother’s lips he pricked
white lines into her skin
and a curtain of cooking oil and mildew
swept from wall to wall and she couldn’t read
the tile flooring’s dots in the dirt that crept
into each corner and when her body
thickened like a package wrapped
to be sent somewhere far away
she clenched her teeth and tried
to shed her bones and muscles
and turn to steam
hissing in the pipes.
Author’s Note: This poem grew out of my friendship with another woman who had a difficult childhood. She didn’t say much about it. I intuited that she didn’t have much support from anyone and spent a lot of time just hoping not to be noticed and searching inside herself for a safe place.
Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. She was awarded two artist residencies in poetry to the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart prizes and two poems appear in anthologies on the subject of migration. Her journal publications include B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, The Pinch Journal and Prelude.
