LOLITA ERASURES: 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 18

2.

I am a pocket of memory

writing the remnants
of suspended bloom

Somebody told me later
he had taken advantage of me

poetry blazed       like my home

5.

The pale tissue of my boundaries
mirrory        shifty       shattering
within the same plain-skinned human girl

subtle signs       the wound
maturing with the girl

I tell myself a writer is dissolved in the book

6.

I have tampered with the details of a moment
wrapped in the gauze of pleasure

I hesitate to linger in that memory

I could not help
noticing what I noticed

our clenched teeth       the layer of red

the brief burden of brave fifteen

8.
I was naïve as velvet
I had a girl’s
       hysterics

this man was not taught self-control

the situation            between him and me
the act of being helpless

I was his student
hovering around all the time
agreeing      reading on the window sill
revealing nothing            except
collaboration with the guilty

11.

I wrote as he sat next to me grading
took up a strategic position
retreated      lay down my raised blades

I felt like some predator
girlish but not quite a girl

noticed the fluttering of desire
sudden under skirt
tenderness seeping through
his thin voice:
you should stay

but my mother was coming

he was a grown up
with a writer’s means of seduction:

the unfinished poem
I know by heart

he got away with it          of course

14.

I felt delicately constructed
not real       floating
in the dark afternoon

silence seemed to afflict me

the repetition of please
the word     pathetic as foresight

I would stay after school

I had to brace for that contact

18.

The veil tearing away       strain creeps in
a shimmer of steel on the threshold

the transformation       my brand-new beauty
solemn and pink as a child bride

I entered into a relationship with ugliness
within that expanse       of feminine quiet