She didn’t say it to me. But I was old enough to understand it pertained to girls like me, to the women we would be—the not born with it, I mean. I’m trying to explain why, when the house painter sent me a video of him playing the saxophone in a dim but freshly painted dining room, naked beneath his white overalls, his eye contact with the camera as he wailed— I really didn’t think it meant what he probably meant it to mean— he’d talked to me about his daughter, about his wife. He’d be back in the spring , to finish the outside of the house. When he fell off someone else’s roof and broke his foot, I was surprised by how safe it felt to ask for my deposit money back. When he said I was beautiful I found out I still believed I should say thank you.
Rebecca Brock’s work appears/will appear in CALYX, Mom Egg Review, Threepenny Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Recently, she won the Spring 2021 prize at Sheila-Na-Gig and was a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices contest at Finishing Line Press. Idaho born, she is raising her two sons in Virginia and still isn’t used to the humidity. You can find more of her work at rebeccabrock.org.
*Rebecca Brock is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. This poem was accepted before she became a reader.
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