by Marina Hope Wilson

And so it was I tumbled nightly
from the window after sliding it quietly open
and snuck through the abandoned schoolyard
to the field where we met and drank
stolen Bartles & James, or made out
in someone’s trashed trailer,
or what counted as making out
at twelve or thirteen, then riding on
the handlebars of the cop’s son’s bike
just as the sun was coming up, and him saying,
I hella like you now, and his breath on the back
of my neck combined with the surprise of daylight,
and how earlier he had laughed with his friends
about a girl he knew, and how wet she got,
and how disgusted he was, and
a hot feeling rose up in me
of everything it meant to be poor,
and a girl, and in a body,
with no one seeming to be watching,
or to be visible only in the worst ways,
and the shame of those unalterable facts filling me
while they laughed at the girl’s singular desire,
which I knew not to be singular at all.

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Marina Hope Wilson’s poems have appeared in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Mulberry Literary, Kissing Dynamite, Jet Fuel Review, $, The Racket, Broad River Review, Bodega, and Stirring. She won the 2023 Rash Award in Poetry for her poem, “Origin.” Her poem, “Dilemma,” was nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net anthology. Her chapbook, Nighttime, was published via Cooper Dillon Books in January, 2024. Marina lives in San Francisco with her husband, stepdaughter, and two cats, and makes her living as a speech-language therapist.