The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay by Dale Walls

Author:Dale Walls
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Levine Querido

SIXTEEN

March 24, Seven Days to Deadline

Now that Knox was here, Dawn saw her room as small and unimportant. Nothing in it gave the idea that an interesting and fully formed person might live inside. She had a ratty blue bedspread and white dresser drawer. On top of the dresser sat two small containers filled with clip-on earrings she had worn so many times she’d forgotten where any of them had come from. A television that had stopped showing actual channels sometime between elementary school and this exact moment sat buzzing hushed static ceaselessly in the corner. She kept it on because she liked the white noise in the background.

As they sat together on her bed, she watched Knox move his eyes over her empty walls, the TV glowing soft against his skin. She’d never brought anyone she was interested in here before and hesitantly watched him observing all the nothing. The marigolds from their first date sat on a makeshift shelf beside her bed. She became excruciatingly aware of the winding springs of her mattress pushing upward into her thighs and the cheapness of the bed.

They sat close enough to each other to make her nervous but far enough to make her want more. The wanting made her feel childish. She untangled herself from the comforter and walked across the room.

She stood in front of her dresser and bent down to the bottom drawer where she kept her books.

“Do you like poetry?” she asked.

“Sure, I guess. I mean, I don’t know much about it.”

“My friend Georgia got me into it.”

She stood up and walked back to the bed where Knox had comfortably trapped himself in the blanket atop her sheets. With one hand grasping the book, she used the other to join him under the warmth. In an attempt to get comfortable, her hand brushed against his knee and she drew back. Their eyes met, and he smiled but said nothing. Her stomach turned over again and again. She tried to concentrate on the book and let her thumb fall over several pages until it met a worn space where the binding had bent backwards and broken.

When I see you pass by, my indolent darling,

To the sound of music that the ceiling deadens,

Pausing in your slow and harmonious movements,

Turning here and there the boredom of your gaze;

When I study, in the gaslight which colors it,

Your pale forehead, embellished with a morbid charm,

Where the torches of evening kindle a dawn,

And your eyes alluring as a portrait’s,

I say within: “How fair she is! How strangely fresh!”

Huge, massive memory, royal, heavy tower,

Crowns her; her heart bruised like a peach

Is ripe like her body for a skillful lover.

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