Fall 2021
milk carton portrait Alexia Partouche we used to laugh about how the girl on the milk carton looked a little bit like me, empty eyes and a flatline mouth while she watched us pour, milky white like the girl next door’s skin, the way it shone under the fluorescent classroom lights, like the glaze on our ceramic bowls, easy to break but so damn pretty on the eyes. we talked to her parents when they moved in, but she was mine alone, in passing glances at her hips, the shape of her, and when we spoke the first time i thought of what a wonderful thing it would be, to crawl into her mouth and feel the sleekness of those fallow teeth and the thin plush of her lips opening and closing like the doors to something beautiful i could barely understand. we touched and my body fell, feather-light, into hers, a freckled pillow to hold me, and could she do it for longer? there was nothing warmer than the blush when her cheek was pressed against mine, her blemishes sinking into my face like ink into water, spirals coming loose, captivating in their messiness. on her collarbone i bit promises, whispering “i’ll tell them for you, i’ll tell them for us, could we tell them?” and in her kisses came the reply — “they’ll devour us whole, they’ll eat us alive.” she unraveled my soul from around my skeleton, pulled it out from inside of me, and said “look at this thing, look at what it’s made of.” and i saw the scabbed knees and flower beds in it, the blood and petals that matched hers, and i knew that they would hate us for it. so i crept out her bedroom window in the middle of the night, and when morning came and we all ate our cereal, we talked about how we couldn’t quite see me in the milk carton portrait anymore.
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