I Too Have Been the Girl by Topaz Winters

reapplying lip gloss

on the sidewalk in the window

of Duane Reade—stubborn

stone catching the current,

white oak rooted heavy

& shameless, splitting the brittle

bones of concrete. Before

I morphed not-girl, less limb

than lung, chill exhaled

from a wet dark mouth,

body unravelled to pixels

with photographer precision.

Nothing canyon in me. I keep

time in subway stops, scoff at

the aeons between flesh

& its consequence of plastic.

Everything I eat runs

through me as pity. Still

I’m not yet reduced to carrying

home the full-length mirror

leaning against the industrial

dumpster, its shattered face

splitting traffic jams in two,

an erosion so ordinary it might

pass for trespass. To slicking

gloss on the tender lips

of Prospect Park daffodils,

or calling it luck when it’s just

an eight o’clock sunset.

The hours are fickle gods.

Everything is urgent when you

have no one else to be.

---

TOPAZ WINTERS is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022, winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & a LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024, finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project. Topaz’s poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, & others. Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, & the National YoungArts Foundation. She lives between New York & Singapore.

Website

Instagram

Bluesky