Crush 1999
By Peter Mason
The good lilac just beyond the house
hangs in bloom like a lace dress.
With no one home, I gather
my young body from the closet,
smell every floral and vased death,
fit loose my sister’s robin’s egg
skirt around my waist. Quiet,
in her unlit room, I go tenderly
to the mirror, my bare collarbone
a trickled pond of redbirds
that will ribbon unsoftly with time—
but here, now, I am seven, and love
so deeply a boy in second grade,
I need to be pretty in the dark.
