Tonight's Poet Corner: Vanessa Doll

Vanessa Doll
by Belinda Roddie

My name is not Vance Dubois,
ma'am, so please don't call me
Vance Dubois, ma'am. I'm not
from Woodstock, Illinois, ma'am,
and I wasn't meant to have been
born a boy, ma'am.

I grew up in a seven-child household,
see, and didn't like the way my siblings
looked at me. They made me shave
my head more than once, you know,
and I tried running away from home
about twelve times or so.

All the boys wore suits and flannel
at the bars, and I stole tubes of lipstick
from my girlfriends' cars. Thirteenth time
was a charm when I fled at seventeen,
started hormone therapy once I was
three years clean.

So my name is not Vance Dubois,
ma'am, so please don't call me
Vance Dubois, ma'am. I'm a small
town girl in my own private world,
and I've never been from Woodstock,
Illinois, ma'am.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Today's OneWord: Madman

Here we have the madman, standing at the podium. He screams threats and obscenities, and the meager audience cheers. They wear red hats and stamp their feet and gesture to the wind, taunting the spirits and daring them to change the course of time, to change the course of history, which never, ever ends. The madman is strutting. He's grinning at his prize. In perhaps a year, the world will change - the colors will all dim.
Read more

Today's OneWord: Statues

Why were the statues going white, and why was the rain cascading in sheets? I tried to find solace by the window, but the world outside had become nothing but glass. Blankets of water blurred the semblance of life that I stretched my mind to detect. Near me, my lover was asleep on the divan with wine pooling across her lap. Her curls lay in wet swaths around the warm nape of her neck. The statues would crumble in due time. The deluge was impending. We both would drown.
Read more