A Poem by Charlotte O'Brien
Gaze
The first time / I kissed a woman / she was the wind / blowing in
on a night you least expect it / turning heads the way her daddy taught
her / always / restless / shuffling on slender legs / a chestnut mane
long fingers sucking down a cigarette / hungry,
I wanted to cradle her / already / the mother
not knowing what it meant / this wish / to feed / be fed by / someone
worrying, I was the same as all the men who wanted her / trying
to buy her / affection / cheap perfume and swank hotels / she was all street
and smarts / by then / she’d been around the block / outliving
her downtrodden mother and her drunken cop-father / she knew
an opportunity when she took one / nothing can prepare you
for the mean streets / like being raped by your father.
(I was) a girl / in love without / understanding / the clutch
in my groin was the speed with which a needle can
slam a vein / dissolved in ritual / hidden
behind the fading day / a light pink film / the cloak of blood-let
flooding the apartment. Outside, Melbourne
caught in its nine-to-five / together / we couldn’t stop
but we stopped time / the way / we caressed
the crook of each other’s arm / the translucent underside—
taut belly of a beast / a cold fish in its dying gasp.
I was upturned / capsized / hell bent / delivering myself
to evil / afraid of the men who recognized my want / and knew
a starving girl when they saw one / afraid I’d be caught / dead
by the man who craved my nineteen-year-old body.
At night, we roamed / the streets / scoured floodlit windows.
Inside, perfect / strangers shed their day / a hull of amber—
shadow puppets / empty armchairs / set tables / curtains split
to comfort / life
without a hole inside it. It must’ve been spring.
The two of us giggling and hushing each other,
unhooking hanging gardens from porches / petunias
and honeysuckle / daffodils, with their throats struck open
before / morning broke / surfacing the evidence / our crime
collected and left to die / we couldn’t care / for living
things. I thought a blackened spoon / a flame
could stave off / hunger / mistaking love for / her blue vein
hardening to my touch / mistaking tenderness for needle
precision / waiting for the blood-let /
fire-rush / for her to love me.
Charlotte O'Brien was born in England and lived in Australia, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Portland, Oregon. Charlotte is a queer writer with essays and interviews published in The Rumpus, Mutha Magazine, and The Manifest-Station. Her poetry has appeared online and in journals such as Apercus Quarterly, Cider Press Review, and Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets Anthology. She holds an MFA in poetry and nonfiction from Pacific University and is working on an MBA in Design Strategy at CCA. She is an artist, advocate and ally, and considers herself lucky to live in a house full of irreverent mammals.
