Portrait of a Preteen Brooklyn Girl

There was something in her,
blue-veined, paper-skinned, paroxysm-prone—something wild and yet
forgiving, as if you could hit a man and she wouldn’t tell
a soul. Black rims around her irises, scleras glossy like
cabinets over-veneered;
not in artificiality, but unalloyed ardor,
trying to make wood
extraordinary. And that’s what she wanted:
to be extraordinary. She’d never say it, but she never had to—
it was in the emeraldness of her eyes, her dyssynergia, her passion;
shivers of disconnection with the outside world, an apoplectic introversion,
panicked in crowds, gasping alone, a few frames snipped out of film as she walked with
Protestant austerity, all angles and bones:
gauche, brainstemmed animal motion, oversized houndstooth coat, squeezy Doc Martins.
The colors of her blouse and mid-length skirt
dismatched ever so slightly—pine green and salmon, stiff periwinkle scarf,
flowered corners, blushed cheeks, undentisted, twisted, but with
a complicated warmth: a standoffishness that was accidental,
more awkwardness than malice, something
forgivable, overlookable, a buzz in the ear of her
odd beauty, champagne-colored, unalarmingly jaundicey,
hair an odd shade of ebony-freckled
hazelnut. And she stood: gangly-muscle, pernoctating, all enjambment and caesura,
arms without a proper place to rest, staggering as if she needed to move
but could not tell
where to go.

Zīyaṭ is a poet from the Seattle area whose work has been featured in Points in Case, The Huffington Post, Cleaver Magazine, Filament Magazine, Once Unspoken, South Asian Productions, The Far Field, GenHERation, The Sign.al, and Supreme Clientele. Ze are a two-time National Silver Medalist in Poetry from the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. Zer poetry book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Stars, was commended by #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Robert Dugoni, former Washington Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and Pushcart Prize Winner Andrea Hollander.