Best Friends at Seventeen: Sitting in a Pillow Bin at Wal-mart

Women-tongues click

as your lovely drawl diffuses on skull-

shaped pillows. We don’t own them as we slip–

We only own ourselves. So we walk dry

under rain, and laugh

forgetting we hold books

into which women pry–and frown–

as if we held a self-summation.

But we don’t make debris

(having pulled the thorn from the other’s side),

we’re too young and unhurt to know how.