New Bows by Five Quarterly

New Bows

Christina N. Drill

new bows __________ Christina N. Drill

To the fam, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé Knowles

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Magnet(*)

6 7

diary excerpts

What it would feel like to die in high school 8

dark days

lunch poem

93.1 Amor

havana

SWOT

In an apartment(^)

15 16

Rock the boat(&) secret private things you can do 17

untitled 18

19 20

8 love poem

Stalker Song

* “Magnet” was originally published by Two Serious Ladies in April 2012 ^ “in an apartment” was originally published by Pieces of Cake in July 2012 & “rock the boat” was originally published by Egnatia Press in January 2013

Magnet Me in a fur coat You in a cur coat Me in a fur coat first You with the idea of The fur coat first

diary

on march 12 2004 i told myself id kiss someone by april 12 2004 and i did it! i have never felt so accomplished in my life. diary paul is just shitty at being a boyfriend. never texted me from virginia, etc. i hate it. d losing my virginity was nothing. nothinggggggg. we watched seinfeld. d people can do whatever they want. aria is not my friend anymore. so, so what. d i think i got high the right way for the first time tonight. was pretty cray-z. don’t remember much but remember thinking how being young is a lucky thing. do i get it? might not, or it’s something you don’t get, or that’s the point ……..

What it would feel like to die in high school "I like your new beau," Mrs. Hanrahan says to me, as I walk out of the locker room after first period gym, dissatisfied with my hair and face. "My new bow?" I reach atop my head, grabbing the half-up part of my hairstyle and hitting at it with my palm to understand. "No," Hanrahan shakes her head. "Your new beau." My eyes get wider and wider. Now both my hands are hitting at my head, ruining the hair-do I just fixed, grasping for whatever "bow"-like shape I must have twisted in that must be of note if my gym teacher, whose opinion neither mattered nor existed to me previously, was approving of. "Nawwww," Hanrahan shouts, irritated, then hits me in the ear with her attendance clipboard. "Your beau. Your boyfriend. I like him," and she winks. I make it to Psych, on time, but exhausted. I sit down in my seat. Everybody looks somber. We are not watching Sybil today. Instead what we’ll do, Ms. Roura says, is watch Christina’s body crack open. When the late bell rings blades and shards from a car fall from the sky at my unprotected skull. I have no time to react: since I am so small, I just die. My brains come out, and there is so much blood it covers the surface area of eight tiles. Later, at the service thing, my beau is there. He sobs about the last volleyball game I ever played. He reads a hymn from a Driver's Ed manual. My parents aren't even there-- they are too overcome with grief. People play an Oasis song, and it matters. I am in a slender box, and inside it, people put Twizzlers, and peanut M&Ms. This is sooooo much better than prom.

dark days all of the batteries in your electric things go dead fast. you can't remember the last time you marked the calendar. like pregnancy you are fat with something so great your fingers won't touch. behind the mittens, the refrigerator door holds seven asian cooking sauces. your mother, when she visits for fun, spies Cheerios next to the olives. you apologize, you say "god, come help us,” and awfully you laugh. after you cry you go for a "food shop" instead of "food shopping" for that is a gun to you and your mother's head.

lunch poem In tenth grade you sucked on my new perfect boob in your Pathfinder at the foot of the hill where Nisha and I used to pick buttercup weeds and onion grass for fairy necklaces. In the dead end house along the hill a Heimlich dummy sat shotgun in a parked Buick wagon, angled back like it, too, was enjoying something pleasurable. As you sucked on my boob I surveyed the mannequin. It looked like a corpse, one without skin or feelers, probably farting dust. This was my lunch period. I forwent chicken fingers for this. I need to close my eyes. The words "Fate & Destiny" show up in glitter. This makes me hiccup, which makes you moan, which makes me want to kiss someone, all of a sudden.

93.1 Amor spanish love songs in the car go twisting with the memory of my mother the same way sabado gigante does with me fighting for my initials on the lunchbox i leave a clean trail of snot down 208 sending minivans to shoulders like slick dummy fish until i am left dripping in a vague gold guilt in a city that shrugs at these small memories of tiles, my lead on this mystery of a Julio Iglesias tape lodged between a seat and a basket of pins.

havana

tia remembers boiling pots of water that scalded her neck and chin the color of sangria and her Spanish grandmother patting red tomatoes down below her mouth. i imagine the seeds vamoosing down her three year old stomach the cooling properties of fat tomatoes leaving wet trickles like thick veins like gut prayers like the rose petals i was baptized with dark and black in the pictures developed like how it felt to break tight skin like how the reverend was a woman but not the burn: what that would look like, not the burn.

STRENGTHS track record can always relate can follow sports

WEAKNESSES eating things in brine unfair spelling bee disqualification in 8th grade. unfair semifinals disqualification in Governor’s School. The name “Tobias” also unfair

so many unfairs

stitches and past desperatenesses cleopatra nose? zodiac signs. boobs in weather

my two left feet my left arm. OPPORTUNITIES definitely tea, assembling a lunch, his notebook on the table.

THREATS logic & obvious solutions grace and graceful women Grace Kelly

the door crying at art or dogs

money jack telephone jack

chances to nest. child mother mother.

In an apartment I am floating in muck. Hello? Mom? I’m floating in a pile of yuck nuggets. What’re you gonna do? What’re you gonna say about it? They don’t let me turn on the TV. They make me eat casserole. Here, they lay me down, and everything happens without me. Mom it’s like every time I breathe there’s something else I could’ve done instead. I could’ve paid for Uncle Oscar’s freeze door but I didn’t. He hates it, living in that neighborhood. He says there’s a cat at the door.

Rock the boat She has died somewhere, in a bermuda triangle, of course. On graduation cruise ships we listened to the news. The millennium had just turned. They buried her in brooklyn. Her smile, i mean, is so dead. Her head it has a hole in it. She is such a skull in the ground. They say there is hope in a legacy. It is in the jukebox, and it is blaring, and it is such a classic. On a cloud a perfect stomach dances on the hull of a yacht. Among the paling white caps i imagine breached sailors tell stories, sad like the ones like these.

secret private things you can do take your hair out your ponytail for the boy who is watching. sleep with someone else's light on. lick toothpaste off your middle finger and smack your lips around. close the door on someone in a fight. masturbate like a lady during circle time on the floor of your first grade classroom. live your whole life thinking your teacher hadn't seen a thing. lick vibrators, but live your whole life thinking about your parents. in bed chew ice without lights on. wave from a secret hill, see someone else's light is on. not bother. don’t go see.

My ex boyfriend labeled every boy I kept in touch with a species of ursa (bear). It was his way of demoting everyone to the position of non-threat. Craig the DJ's sobriquet was the panda. Both Owens from writing college were koalas. My dad apparently was not a bear. Zohir from Change House sold his bear poems for eight dollars. It is in that purchase I learned about sun bears. Joe is a definite sun bear. He is not endangered but he is vulnerable. He eats berries. He roams. In his DNA there lie discontented genes that tell him he does not belong. It is the poles that say Sun bears go east or they go west. Zohir says Moon bears are also Sun bears if only for the pink fur crescent that nestles by the heart where all the skin is pale. Past the heart there is not much and just about where Zohir stopped.

8 Cady and Madeline wear sunglasses on their heads, ears, collars, and eyes. During school they give each other gifts, little pink golf balls, pieces of paper folded up twisted. Cady says Madeline is always cool, but that her feet smell, and that she sees no friends in her future if she does not start brushing her teeth in the mornings. Madeline says Cady is always at her lake house. I only see them after school.

Linda is Cady's mother. Eva is Cady's babysitter. Eva is two hundred pounds and from outside of Warsaw. Cady speaks Polish but only with Eva since nobody else in Cady’s life speaks Polish. This does not make Cady weird, just elite. Madeline wants to know why Cady never comes to her house. Madeline that says that well anyway, she is moving, and will soon be a queen with a pool. Will Cady come over then?

Katie is the other one. She has bangs like Cady's. The bangs are big, blow-dried, the color bronde. Miss Knickerbocker says bronde is the new dirty blonde, which is Taylor Swift's hair color. Everyone asks me to play “Trouble.” I am like “Trouble?” And they are like “By Taylor.” They touch my face with little hands. Sweaty from their little bodies.

love poem you are so beautiful i cannot help but yell at you and make you cry. i always worry you’ll be my first funeral. i've already prepared the tears you get. they are so strong. they wet all the books and nobody will be able to forget you.

Stalker Song In the sentiment I mean to do a good stalker song it needs to be you singing for him like cattle like there is no moon outside or underneath like there is no way in hell he is ever coming back and you are putting it on at the show.

~*~*~*~*