Today's poem is by Natalie Louise Tombasco

Lolita's Exorcism
       

In the back seat of the yellow bus, our heads whirled round
like tops upon gingham frocks. Summer on the cusp
& overnight we busted into beasts with golden leg hair,

stench, butterfly clips & hip bones that appeared in rooms
before us. In the '90s, we were damn fine, serpentine,
had lick me eyes at eleven, split-tongued & stanning for Satan—

peccadillo our way to someday be a good little host body.
We flat-ironed gyres from our hair, left bloodstains on white couches.
Our mouths stuffed with bars of soap for flinging twats & cunts

around the locker room like wet toilet paper. Parasitic perverts,
whispered the world behind our backs, but really we kept
Mr. Rubberwood from jamming sticks into our bicycle wheels.

It seems, back then, we were a turn of phrase: spirling out, fatherless,
thought nuclear family meant mushroom cloud. Our mothers tried
to restore order, brought in doctors, priests, that studly crucifix. O,

how mother tossed a box of tampons upon the bed. Carefully
read the instructions, she said. That thing upstairs is not my daughter.
Flew over our handlebars, full stop. A cloud split like an atom.

Who would teach us how to break? Time fell from a sycamore
like helicopter seeds. It blanketed us as we went head-spinning,
headboard-shaking, contorting into teen girls. Didn't we piss on

the front lawn, eat raw red meat during TRL? Rehearsed guttural
shrieks as the wind's wet fingers rubbed circles over wine glasses?
Didn't we carve 666 into wrists & spider-walk down the stairs

in prom dresses, men hiding in the crawlspace of our chests?
Hadn't mother warned us? It seems our trial was being enterable,
brassy things with big opinions. Had our blood oath gone

crystalline sacrilege? If evil existed, why did it find shelter
in us as we glittered & danced under the sprinkler's tsk tsk?

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Copyright © 2023 Natalie Louise Tombasco All rights reserved
from The Cincinnati Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission