Angela Horner

She’s got this thing she does
sometimes, this bend &
flick like waterdroplets are sucking
her eyelashes. She practices, her mirror
a jumping jack on the wall. She will stand in place
and her body will move, or her body will stand in place
and she will move. She will place a leg side-
ways or right side out, bend her lashes: each cervical vertebrae a repeat
of forward motion, something she hums with her lips til
each limb whispers in motion.
Her friends taught her that he wants her:
he bumps it into speech through semaphores (A, E, I, O, you
raise the flag for surrender) and she leans
forward to catch these vowels. They turn into verbs:
Arms raised, raised skirt, skirt short, shorts gone.
There’s something wrong so she’ll try this leg lift
to the beat of drum drum, drum drum, but it didn’t catch him
in time.

Angela Horner is a Baltimore writer, copyright editor, and host of the Moaning Pipe Cabaret.