The skinny girls in their boots don’t have eyes anymore.
They have lids, greasy and glazed with eye-shadow
and black line of eyeliner and a veil of lashes.
The skinny girls in their boots don’t speak;
I don’t anymore either.
The middle-aged women at the dinner table
with their lip wrinkles like a corpse
with their mouth sewn shut.
Jeanne had an afternoon off from helping Fabio in the store.
“Maybe I’ll bake something!” she exclaimed with enthusiasm.
I watched as she did three loads of laundry, hung the sheets,
and ironed the pants. She baked a torte and apologized
when dinner was late on the table.
Paolo can’t get a girlfriend
because every night he stands in front of a door,
smoking cigarettes and creating more dents in his face.
He waxes his eyebrows and his hair is glued upwards.
I wondered why the Italian men hit on the American girls
until I opened my eyes wide and he offered me a free shot;
“You know what I love most about this girl,” he said,
“She always leaves me speechless.”
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3 comments:
This one is also interesting. I like it. I think the gender theme could carry over in the last stanza more strongly than in the first two.
Yeah, I wasn't sure how to end it and it was like two in the morning and I just left it. I see your point.
The theme of the first two stanzas is very clear, except the line "I don't anymore either." Your personal relationship to the poem is a little unclear to me, both in that line and in the last stanza. I'm guessing it's something about how living amongst this has changed you, but it isn't completely clear to me. The last two lines also seem to come out of thin air, but I can see how they relate to the descriptions at the beginning. Maybe make it clearer who "this girl" is? You set up an interesting contrast, but I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say with it.
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