GIRL BECOMING GIRL BECOMES STORY
& They’ll say it’s the wolf or the dark or the mother
whose candles all burned to nubs that was
the needle-prick that started me running. But hunger
is a reaching-thing, a doorway to heaven if heaven
is bed where sleep doesn’t involve men or woods
or bones or babies. Because what I’ve been given
is a mouth and then told: how pretty
how nice
how still
with the door closed/locked
how pretty
sits in his lap
how pretty
swallows doesn’t bite.
Except,
when I was six my mother bit me hard on the arm, took
my wedge of skin, between her teeth and held it
while I sat, shocked-still in her lap felt her breasts
pressed into my back, the sharp curve of her smile—
like being hugged & struck & fed, like sinking
to the bottom of a swimming pool
and giving in to the burning in my lungs, to the desire
to disappear so completely that distance
time too, becomes nothing but the outline of a moon,
mottled & wet & rising on my forearm.
And when it happens
I’m at my high school graduation
at college, in the back of a friend’s car,
at my sister’s wedding
about to make a toast
about to move out of state
about to paint the walls of my living
room white.
When it happens, I have just given
birth to my son and through
the thinness of the hospital gown
the floor against my hip is cool.
I’ve fallen. Fainted in the doorway
of a bathroom and later the nurse
will say it was the emptiness
my body hadn’t adjusted to.
My babe grown big enough to drive
pulls me sideways
into a hug so ordinary, I almost
miss the press—
my cheek,
his chest, his hand on my arm,
and I’m reminded that each touch,
each collision
is a kind of loss
unremarkable
as the floor beneath my feet
or the chair
you are sitting on. Because
when it happens, when we touch,
bump, crash into one another’s
lives—
and we touch
sometimes for the only
the briefest moment
what’s left behind, caught
in the net of our bodies
stretches us
till we are wide and deep as breath.
Rosa Castellano is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. In 2021, she was a finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and her work can be found or is forthcoming from RHINO Poetry, The Southampton Review, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest, among others.