At Twenty

Heidi Seaborn

I went braless, twiggy hips
wrapped in Indian print skirts.
I unearthed the unfaithful,
winking at trombones. I was vascular 
and green. Jazz belting and gartered
in macramé. I was suede and supercool. 
I was stereo. If you pulled up your socks 
you knew me then. A snapdragon, a tramp
roaming the rails. There was no trust fund.
At twenty I broke theory
into bite size pieces and rollerbladed
like a prophet. I debated Kierkegaard
in the john, was queen of the truck stop.
Skintight with the riff raff revolution,
I pawned every prick and pixel
and moonwalked on a tightrope.
At twenty I could ruin you—
I swore an oath to love 
and obey until obituary. 
I was braided like a bamboo mat,
was corked and laid
to ferment like some living thing.
I looked for the asterisk, the footnote.
I was out of gossip, of eyeliner. 
I swore in French. Zut alors
I’d become the fringe on a can can dress, 
the flea in a micro circus, so small
I was barely there at all.

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of 2020 PANK Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks. Recent work in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Diode, the Financial Times of London, The Missouri Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Offing and The Slowdown and the Washington Post. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com