1000

my roommate one year in college
would say of my smallness
that any man who found me attractive
had a trace of the pedophilic

& i would shrink         newly girled
twenty-one with my eyebrows
plucked to grownup arches         sprouting
back every three weeks
in sharp little shoots         already men
have tried to steal me

in their taxis         corral me into alleyways
of the new city         already
the demand for my name         though
no one ever asks how old i am

though no one ever did         i feel creaking
& ancient in the repetition
of it all         i feel my girlhood gone for
generations         my entire
line of blood crowded with exhausted
women         their unlined faces

frozen in time         with only a thickness
about the waist         a small shoot
of gray to belie the years

i make up names to hand
to strangers at parties
i trim years from my age & share without
being asked         that i am
fifteen         seventeen         & no one blinks
no one         stops wanting

i am disappeared         like all the girls
before me         around me
all the girls to come

everyone thinks
i am a little girl & still
they hunt me         still they show their teeth
i am so tired i am
one thousand years old          one thousand
years older when touched