From the Chorus Line at the Private Men's Club
       

Here we are, figments of your imagination, kicking our cancans
while you fantasize about the ways you'd like to kill us,
how many breaths past death you'd tighten your hands
around throats now singing of diamonds and a girl's best friend.
That hard glitter in your eye is bright enough to wear as an engagement ring,
promise of an eternity spent pretending stupid means a bigger orgasm,
privilege of the body offered up to a lifetime of small deaths.
But we're the girls who've been living an afterlife
since the first school lunch hour a boy put us between his lips,
lit a match and breathed in. The ember or the smoke —
were we to thrill ablaze at his fingertips or in the ethereal grey
ghost escaping his mouth? Soon enough, we learned the phantom
laugh, how to haunt the edges of conversation in the half-life of approval.
In grocery store aisles, church pews, perfumed by fear,
we watched eyes glide across bruises that bejewelled our bare arms.
There are gods and there are sacrifices; you learn where you fit
by the way glances slide away. Here, tonight, your eyes home in.
This is the one place we're allowed centre stage
to shimmy and flirt in praise of all the ways you reign over us —
lords of the chase, riding your gaze like a thoroughbred hunter
bearing down on its sequined prey, a giggly girlie line
kicking its legs ever higher in its quest for a destiny
that will pluck stars from a black velvet sky and kiss them
into derelict skin, the aching void that plays peekaboo between cancan thighs,
whispering, What you see is already gone. A ghost is a girl's best friend.

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Copyright © 2021 Beth Goobie All rights reserved
from Prairie Fire
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission