I could never find my way to the kind of girl
I imagined being, army jacket a breaker over
my scraped shoulders, bent across lined pages,
spilling salt, pockets lined with shells.
I almost dressed up as you
last night, sheer shirt over
jeans, tight black coat;
There is no best way to hide from me.
—
Jesse Rice-Evans is a Southern poet, rhetorician, and Leo/Cancer/Aries. Her first full-length collection is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2019. Read her nonfiction and poetry in Heavy Feather Review, Monstering, Entropy, FIVE2ONE, and The Wanderer, among others. She teaches queer texts and composition at the City College of New York.
Photo by: Ana Prundaru