two-way girl’s mirror Arndt Britschgi
girl, curls in her hair, who picks a flower (dandelion, clusters of them growing in the roadside ditch) in spring to save and dry-press secretly and give a friend (she’s on her way back home from school, and since they’ll stain her fingers gray she knows she’s not allowed to touch them) her teeth too big her teeth too crooked in the smallness of her mouth – she’ll go out angling from the rocks with earthworm bait which she has dug up on the plot behind the house and threads herself, pricking her finger, on the hook; fishing for perch (flatting her face against the cracked boards of the pier between their gaps she can see shoals of perch fish swimming) which she will fry and maybe quick-freeze if she can half-secretly to give a friend for when he comes home from his journey potato-nosed (she herself claims), she loves to read when it gets dark and cold in fall when summer’s ending [for those alone who know how cold it sometimes gets to be in winter, the first snows and the sea frozen – they alone know what it’s worth sometimes when someone thinks of you] girl, her chopped and curled, unruly hair which she won’t comb, who sees the year peel off the layers of its seasons one by one teasing time’s mirror girlishly, all while she grows (she can observe it, in the shower in the bathroom many times, some parts of her starting to catch up with the largeness of her teeth), while the world watches and her eyes dwell on the lines, weighing each line 29
