Katie Darby Mullins
DR. PHIL AND I PRETEND TO BE PUNKS
It didn’t take long for my tattoos
To accumulate: the makeup
To extend out past my eyelid
Further, further. Gold. Glitter. Dirty
Hair, bitten nails. A jacket I sewed
A picture of ‘70s Bowie on the back
Using a hand crippled by neuropathy
Halfway between not holding the needle
At all and piercing through to bone.
I always liked my music with teeth
And once I realized this body was
A loaner, I decked it out like a teenager’s
Car, bumper stickers and flashy dice
Even as I knew the transmission wore
And the engine block wasn’t steady.
My shoulder is dislocated again,
Phil.
It came out, fell
in front of a student after I’d jammed
I
t back in as hard as I could. We’ve done
The shoulder. You know. And you know
I wear a set of figure-8 rings— my iron
Knuckles— so my fingers don’t dislocate
And break. But I’ll be damned
If I don’t wear silver boots or glittered
Shoes and pretend it’s an aesthetic,
A do-it-yourself rag doll, body dressed
Half in braces and prosthetics,
Half in neon rock shirts. And I want
That: the contrast distracts me
From the tint in my glasses,
The sag in my eye.
But when I saw you
Dressed in those fake tattoos, black
Eyeliner raccooned and lined to your cheeks,
It made me wonder if we all had designs
Drawn somewhere inside our skin, hidden
Maybe from even our own view, waiting
To poke through, crooked X’s,
To rise up and scar, leaving color—
Too much color— and strange beauty
Only to the beholder. And yeah,
Yours was a joke. Sometimes I wonder
If I’m joking, too: choosing random things
That make me happy, no rhyme, no reason
Not on my face or in my brain or—
But it doesn’t really matter. I sew,
I play guitar.
I got good at drawing more eyeliner
On one eye to make it look more open.
I put glitter on everything. And when
There’s no glitter left, when I can’t
Bend to tie those shoes with my busted shoulder|
And my fingers, already crooked—
I wear the slip-ons,
the ones with Johnny Ramone
On them. The ones that say
“HEY HO LET’S GO” on the back.
The ones that make me feel like I’m choosing
To look like this. Like it could be a joke
And you and I could just go to wardrobe,
Wash all this away, forget the memories
Etched into our core like permanent ink.