1000
my roommate one year in college
would say of my smallness
that any man who found me attractive
had a trace of the pedophilic


& i would shrink                            newly girled
twenty-one with my eyebrows
plucked to grownup arches                     sprouting
back every three weeks
in sharp little shoots                     already men
have tried to steal me


in their taxis           corral me into alleyways
of the new city                    already
the demand  for my name                      though
no one ever asks how old i am


though no one ever did          i feel creaking
& ancient in the repetition
of it all           i feel my girlhood gone for
generations            my entire
line of blood crowded with exhausted
women                    their unlined faces

frozen in time                    with only a thickness
about the waist                  a small shoot
of gray to belie the years


i make up names to hand
to strangers at parties
i trim years from my age & share without
being asked            that i am
fifteen                      seventeen              & no one blinks
no one                     stops wanting


i am disappeared              like all the girls
before me            around me
all the girls to come


everyone thinks
i am a little girl & still
they hunt me                       still they show their teeth
i am so tired i am
one thousand  years old                  one thousand
years older when touched