Tala Wilder

CHRISTIAN SCHOOL DRESS CODE VIOLATIONS IN SPRING

It's only girls in the basement in a stumbly line
listening to the midline electric buzzing.

Floor like a radioactive bog: fuzzed green
and wrong in the artificial light of a wild new day.

Girls and boys are not the same. I feel my soft, young
mind pool around the idea like a failed throw on a wheel.

Once I walked out of the girls' bathroom to see three
sixteen-year-old boys wearing only basketball shorts and slides.

Gulping water, they had droplets running down their chins
to rest on their bare muscled chests like dollops of clover honey.

I ran away down the hall,
tripping on my untied shoelace.

Later, in a scratchy tweed chair, a man
tells me I am being detained after school

for revealing the skin of my lower back to three
boys while bending over to tie my shoe.

In the basement, a different man says to the line of us
girls that pearls are actually made of dirt and smell like vomit.

He reads the rules of the dress code, but he is
really saying we are all the rage he has inside him.

Walking down the line, he hides under the white flag
of God while he assesses the display of our bodies.

In the basement, some of us smile.
Some of us are told we can go.

Amber, who asked everyone to call her
Pixie, has black mascara stems

growing down her face, turning her
eyes into dewed defiant orchids.

Lately, Pixie and I have started keeping angry bees
in the hollows of our lower back and our armpits.

She looks over at me as the man reads out the rules.
She doesn’t speak, but still she tells me we should

add some bees to the velvet spaces inside our navels
and around our collarbones. They fly out and sting.

And what can he do about that?
Not knowing where they came from.

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