Wherewithal via skinny jeans
She knows it's something else—

something harsh and tightening,
a thousand reflective glass doors

that offer her startling expressions
via semantics, but the bolts

are locked from the inside. Strange
fissures of formatting, the

poem is intertwined with the girl,
she knows it's something else

in the cottony pool in the back of her
throat, a shriven silhouette

she can hear her feet click
against the floor and the

hands-all-over approach
makes her sick, so sick her

knees shake in the orchid-pale
light, the overhead pulses and

buzzes like an apocalyptic prophecy,
she is meant for the dark room

but she hasn't the wherewithal
to change to goddamn bulb, instead

she is closing her eyes, letting
him slide her jeans off, the thigh

larger than the slope of the knee,
the ankle is a gabbled grunt

belonging to the teeth of her foot,
she scrapes her toenail up the front

of his body, waiting, impatiently.
Her socks pool on the carpet,

the ceiling fan is in love with itself
the lusty gulps of its pulsation

overhead beats on,
and on,

and on, the sound of a bug let
loose in flight somewhere

in the highest cracks of the room.
Her t-shirt is made of plastic, it

would seem, her breasts
are red bricks; neck lolls

back and she forgets the
demeanor of the room, the

shape of her name on an overdrawn
checking account, the unbearable urge

to scream. She knows it's something else;
not just the way she overseas herself

in the mirror, the way she scrutinizes herself
as though imperfection were punishable

by death. You see, she has broken
the bridge of her tutelage on crimes

of passion, her head hot and swelling
with the centennials of a thousand conundrums,

you see, she knows it's something else,
something beyond her, deeper

than she is as her tread sinks into the
cold linoleum, she believes sexuality

is personality, and she sucks at a jawbone,
says it's the epicenter of a man,

zips the fly of her wherewithal,
fights the urge to over think it.