Field Guide to Predators in Their Natural Habitat
The Photographs Never Develop Like You Imagine
I’m a photographer, he said, I want you to pose for me.
A camera dangled from his neck instead of a whistle—
otherwise he was my dad’s stand-in, blue Oxford
tucked into khakis. He found me in the concession
line, five bucks sweating in my palm. My mother
was cheering on my twin brother’s soccer team;
my father was the coach, and the August heat played
goal against an unstoppable dark. He steered me
to the swings, pinching my arm, then to the playground
horses, their painted-on eyelashes batting. He posed me
how he wanted me seen. From the field I heard
my brother starting a fist-fight; when I turned
to look, the man shook my chin back into place.
Don’t move, his voice like cleats scraping knees.
He orbited me, excited electron, saliva foaming
at the corners of his mouth as he shot. Good girl.
I didn’t correct him, his camera glared a gleam.
He fixed me atop the jungle gym; when ordered,
I hung inverted, Like a Princess transforming into a bat.
His lens stiffened from its cave. Shutterstun of clicks.
I struggled to right myself. After, he bought a Kit Kat
we shared behind the stand. His thumb slid chocolate
across my cheek, my last picture. He walked me
into view, finger jabbing my spine forward, to where
a referee was handing my offsides brother a red card.
My mother jotted our address on a used roster.
Before he left, he said, You have such a beautiful daughter.
In the van, my mother said, Don’t go missing like that.
The next day, she shaved my head. I watched
the mailbox but nothing ever came.
I never saw the girl he took again.
Junior Scientist Summer Camp
That June we were scientists, bluing liquids
in our beakers, iodinating slides to illuminate
the interior lives of basil, gluing bisected stamens
into our starter field guides. We wore test-tube
toolbelts to collect stream samples; I used mine
like a sash since it wouldn’t fit my waist.
Misty Mills dubbed me Nerd Rambo, but
Andrea Gerber’s nickname stuck: Miss Obesity,
1989. I was fixed in their binocular crosshairs
after that. Every day, we returned to Maitland
Middle School’s laboratories, composition pages
full, feeling older, on the brink of discovery.
I rode in the back of the bus, self-exiled,
my fat body jostling from the rural roads.
Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic:
I memorized the solid world like an alien
trying to learn how he fit in the new
ecosystem. Then Jeremy Fradin said, Look
at his titties bounce! and the boys circled like
white coats in a medical theater, eyes wide
as magnifying glasses. I was a specimen,
my sweating thighs stuck to the leather seat.
Damon Bixler cupped my breasts from
behind. Mark Collins lifted my shirt. I sent
my mind into the passing orange groves
in full fruit. I stayed still while anonymous
hands took turns to twist. Like radio dials,
a voice as far away as Venus said. I heard
the girls giggling from farther galaxies.
I practiced reciting in my head: krypton,
xenon, boron, argon, neon, the gases once
called inert and which we now call noble
because of their impenetrable electron shells.
