REFUSENIK
I was promised a girl
held her glossy image, shatterable,
ice skating on a Soviet pond.
I’d never seen snow
but for the cut out paper flakes
hung in school hallways.
I only knew rain
as intermittent confusion.
Los Angeles in the ’80s.
We set fire to hairspray
for fun we wrote half-truths
in our padlocked journals,
we collected the phone numbers
of grown men we collected
the gratification of grown men
to trade for money,
we were adolescent!
There was never enough
money and there were never
any quiet moments on a pond
there was never any pond only
swimming pools into whose
water I was not invited.
I couldn’t withstand the excess,
spent any money on bus fare
and lipstick and then,
then V showed up
on a plane from the Soviet Union
and was a boy, they told me
there was
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