i dot my eyes with stars

by Tracie Renee

it’s 1998 and everyone wants to know who i am, including me. this is the question that’s supposed to be easy. it’s the blank on the top of the test page that i should be able to fill in with my eyes shut, the one that says NAME. but when i write the letters my name looks awkward, too round in the ballpoint blue of the pen i grip. So this is the year i dot all the “i”s with stars while my name stutters in my mouth: my name is, my name is, my name.

instead of grounding me when i (choose one) [bleach my hair and dye it electric blue / ignore the dishes in the sink again / scribble poems in the blank soles of the brand-new converse high-tops that were NOT on sale] my mother tells me to call a friend. like she knows grounded is too easy. because i don’t have any friends.

at home the phone rings but never for me. i fill every silence with who i was (obscure violin concertos) and who I want to be (the lookout! records catalog). my homemade mixtapes cut songs off mid-trill or mid-middle-finger-salute because i already know how alone feels. i don’t need to hear it too.

on the bus i blast my walkman loud enough for bass to bleed from my ears and i think maybe this is what it’s like to be a comet and leave in your wake a trail of who you burn to be. at school i open my mouth over and over but the words stall and stall. i carry my quiet into the classrooms, the cafeteria, the hall—everywhere, like breath mints in lonely pockets only my hands fill until

you say here.          let me          take that          let me          help you          let me          get the door. just outside the auditorium i give you my quiet. onstage under too-bright lights i am not expected to be myself. you pass the violin case back to me and here, i’m (choose all that apply) [the dig of catgut strings into studied calluses / the bow’s siren song braid of silence and song / the honey that melts your rasping, amped fender-grind into music]. here i’m all of the above, filling in every answer i’ve left blank: I’m someone I’ll wish on tomorrow. and the lips that you’ll kiss later.

Tracie Renee is a librarian, a Publishers Weekly book reviewer, and an award-winning poet from sort-of Chicago whose mid-life crisis has spawned a novel that no one wants to publish (yet?), a bunch of short stories, and some stuff for kids.