Tonight's Poet Corner: My Alias

My Alias
by Belinda Roddie

I get out of my apartment at 11 PM, my
hair looking like flat asphalt, slicked back
with so much gel. My car keys feel slippery
in my gloves, but my wife's Corvette
glides like a dream girl settling into my lap.
My cologne makes me smell like a superstar.
I am leather and steel toes and Casanova belt

buckles. I ooze brass buttons and rusty
zippers and sport a watch - a wind-up one -
for aesthetic only. I'm simultaneously poser
material and too legit to quit - hipster and
trying way too hard. But that's the way I like it. It's

a lot different than the necktie I knot up
into a Windsor lover for the school I work
at. Different than the orange stamped baseball cap
I pull on when out with my buddies, watching
another game where doped up fatheads hit balls bigger
than their own with sticks harder and stiffer than
their own wood. No, this? It's a good enough
disguise. But really, this subterfuge

won't hold for long in a crowded bar, where
the gin is way too warm, and the wine
is way too cold. I ascend the stairwell
to the roof, where four guys in red
and black drink cocktails that look like
the stuff in neon signs. Is it worth

the extra energy to have a cigarette with
them? They think I'm cool, but the jacket
I'm wearing has a fraying inner lining, and
the boots clinging to my feet have heels
worn down by too much walking. And I can't

help but notice a stain forming on my T-shirt,
dark enough to be blood, like a phantom just
rose from the metropolitan collage, stabbed me
with a dagger-like finger, and growled,
"I see right fucking through you."