When you are but the proto-villainess,
nothing is at stake.
You file yourself away,
acquire the character
of a red herring.
You are too tweedy,
too intellectual, too many words to be
a danger to our heroine.
You putz around in the threshold,
waiting for some fool to finally get it
and ravish you already. This distracts
from your plan, from joining together
the edges of your dissent,
though it keeps you edgy.
When you are riveted by light splotches,
haloes of whitewash buboes
on a Polaroid from 1987,
there is no reason to be filed.
Something in the shake
let the color slake away –
perhaps it was entirely unshaken.
No negative exists, it was its own
obscure moment in a frilly
green-checked two piece,
before your moment.
You still wonder
how the evidence would be used
so let it accompany you,
though it warrants precious little use.
Lindsay Bell received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her thesis is about musicality, not masculinity. She is delighted to have her work included in the inaugural issue of Requited. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Diagram, Black Clock, Crawdad, Buffalo Carp, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In her spare time, she plays guitar, sings, and tries to get people to read her blog.