on a kid listening to green day’s “dookie”

Francesca Tangreti

i want to do 13 again
this time take away the purple and replace it with cargo pant pockets rattling marble-heavy
pizza-bagel-sticky as the swing-set started to sink into the weak soil of christened land oh we were six and convinced we put up that swingset ourselves, you and me, soccer shorts and basketball jersey, two crickets all legs but you still got called “pretty”
the last summer i had a best friend was the last august i was known
when books were an afternoon snack and 10:30 was late both ways and
i wasn’t girl girl girl i was a plastic-wrapped pack of crayola putty in lurid blue and fingerprint-
patterned because i was greedy enough to put my hands all over it (not girl not girl blue blue blue!!!)
i tried the name “Frankie” on my tongue like cinnamon-caked french toast because i had just seen
“The Goonies” with their denim jackets wheezing wily and impish through pirate caves in love
indomitably unquestionably like childhood friends are and
i want to do 13 again but this time
i don’t want to be a girl, i want to be a thing in a ballcap with hardwood floorburns on my elbowskin
and sour sun-sweat under my pits which do Not smell like pink Teen Spirit and warm vanilla sugar is
a distant vocabulary like a father tongue, a father tongue i cut off and planted in my eunuchian solitude to harvest heavy fruit come
October and a hoodie large enough to hold hide me and i will be
13 like boys are 13 with bikes instead of a best friend i wanted to kiss, i wanted wheels to ride so fast i’d skin myself flat so i could
treat the wounds with peroxide and hold the hand of the little boy i’d bleed i’d bleed to be.

Francesca Tangreti is a genderqueer child of an immigrant studying English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University. They hope to pursue a profession in publishing and speak, speak, speak.