Lauren Scharhag and Ashley Cowger

West Side Girl
Lauren Scharhag

I wear my skin like some reject from the Tribes of Ham,
Pale and transparent as skim milk. I can never go home.

My father imparted to me like a curse:
“You’re just like your mother. You’ll never
Be able to live more than thirty miles from the West Side.”
And I think, Of course. He’s right.
He’s always right when I don’t want him to be.

And I wonder if it’s this curse, his curse,
Which also gifts him to be able to see into me,
And I to endure the pain of being seen. After all, my skin is his skin.

Ah, Marìa, Marìa, Marìa-- las très,
Great-grandmother, grandmother, mother,
And I am the break in the rosary beads.
I think of the placenta from my grandmother’s birth buried on the hill,
The hill, which I can never go back to.

Instead, I toe the thirty-mile mark.
“¡Bolilla!” They say. “¡Gringa!”
At nine, I saw myself as naked as Eve,
And hurried to cover up my whiteness.

Now I go, bearing my flesh like shame,
And the neighbors ask who the white girl is who comes and visits.

Someday, I will take a grater to my skin.
I shall cast it off. Flayed, I shall anoint myself with cuminos and cilantro.
In blood I shall make my pilgrimage.
On the Boulevard, I shall hail, Marìa.



Peter Never Came
Ashley Cowger

I was sitting on the edge of the counter, my feet dipping recklessly into the dirty sink, and he was sitting on the side of the bathtub, compulsively rubbing the soap grime along the rim with his thumb.
“I used to believe in Peter Pan,” I told him, leaning the side of my head against the bathroom mirror and closing my eyes. more