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