Less than fur but more than shadow. If I were a boy:
a good start. But I have always been a girl,
even when I wanted
not to be,

wanted to play Harold Hill and lean across the desk
to sing to Marion (in the moonlight, a man
could sing it. In the moonlight…).
Why was it the boys
got all the best 
songs?

Now, with age, I hardly see it, have to tilt my face
to the bathroom spotlight to find it. 
Grown blonde, somehow,
on its own.

Not the harsh practically shimmering gold accusation
it became at age twelve, 
Charlene and I

pinched in her tiny, back-of-the-medicine cabinet
mirror, buttering the top of our lips, 
school paste thick and thicker the bleach
because we couldn’t get it
gone, make it
disappear 
fast

enough. Out out damn spot. Oh, those auditions
for grade school plays. Charlene, Prince John.
Charlene, Lady MacBeth, instead of me
because I didn’t think I’d be allowed
to say damn.

Damn you, mustache, you resistance
to a dainty kind of girlhood,
shoes I couldn’t 
kick the ball in,
dresses frilled
with itch.

I wanted to pitch overhand. I wanted
to sing Dulcinea. I wanted
Danny Zucko’s 
leather jacket

and a pair of black Chuck Taylors that could
run me out of the neighborhood’s
bracket of lawns to the
outskirts,

new houses going up but no walls yet,
foundations only in that
good red clay

my Mama would scrub all day
and never get the stain out.

---

I wrote this poem from the following prompt in Jessica Jacobs’s and Nickole Brown’s Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a glorious, generous book that I highly recommend:

“An ode is a poem that addresses a particular subject, often in praise. In the poem “Ode to Fat,” Ellen Bass revels in her wife’s boundless breasts and marshy belly. / I adore the acreage / of your thighs and praise the promising / planets of your ass. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, see if you can look at the parts of your body you tend to criticize and resee then as opportunities for celebration. Write a description in which you extol the virtues and strengths of these parts, making them—just for the brief duration of this page—each their own kind of superhero.”

---

Rhett Iseman Trull‘s first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.