poem #13

Girlfriends 

by Ellen Dore Watson

First and last, mirrors

whose secrets we keep in a home-made petri dish (sometimes they give us ideas)

I mean the ones who say the unwelcome when it matters

whose kids watch us for clues

whose kids we watch for clues

Not the ones who decide there was too much too true

   of them in our eyes, and ran,

but the ones who'll be around to see us bald or one-breasted

  and we them

who'll know to say what can't be said (with their skin)

whose bodies, spreading or starved, we love

whose husbands (or lack of) it's okay to disapprove, or almost covet

whose girlfriends are ours by proxy

who share these assumptions and would their last

   Godiva, valium, amulet

The lifers

who, even seven states away, are the porches

where we land