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TPC Review Issue 003

Hannah Tool

To the girl crying uncontrollably in a middle school bathroom
   after Kim Addonizio

in a few decades, you’ll toast marshmallows
on a gas stove in your messy kitchen that gets cleaned
often enough. You’ll smoosh together as many s’mores
as you want, any day of the week,
braless and sweatpantsed. Enwombed.
Your body will be bigger, softer, a marvel. Luscious.
You will bask in it. You will let it billow.
You will have slid into the glove of yourself.
You’ll run fingers through the kinks
of all the hair you tore and scraped away.
let it peek from your swimsuit, shade your upper lip,
grey and curl, stink and lank. Shameless.
You will become fetid and strange, hold conversations
with the neighborhood crows and coax
your tomato plant to grow. It will.
Listen: help is coming. You will recognize
your innocence, forgive the riptides that tore
you out to sea, that drowned your goodness.
you will surface again and again
into the sunlight of yourself, little one.
I promise that what comes back to shore
is all cackling pebbles and seafoam. Joy.