By Natasha Rao

I lived on top of the roof, staring at the Jehovah’s Witness
turrets. I lived making up metaphors about the moon

while Bobby balanced a boombox above his shoulders
and squirrels shyly swallowed the spiked heads

of passionflowers, pilfering grape tomatoes and averting
my gaze. I watched the other girls and made notes of

how to be more like that, how to wear a shirt that hangs off
the left shoulder, how to align my body with everything

I’ve ever wanted. I loved when, at the wine store,
it turned out they already had my name in the system.

It’s true there are so many versions of a self,
sometimes one forgets how to walk like the other.

In swimmy reflections or in glasses clean, I watched myself
enjoy being seen, witnessed my evolution into

loud-laughing, cross-legged, can you play the song that
reminds us all where we have been? Inside me is a girl opening

a red locker, unable to envision so many glistening eyes
listening when she opens her mouth. Here I am 

with my hair up, socked foot on your leg. Falling
in love again. Let’s toast to pizza. Let’s order the moon!

With you at last I climb down from my watchtower
and step into the whitelit present tense.

Poet Bio

Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, selected by Ada Limón as winner of the 2021 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Nation, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Rattle, and elsewhere. In 2021, Rao received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. See More By This Poet

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