We knew her but not well,
a dark-haired girl with blue-green eyes,
she went to my school
and my friends and I
all wanted to be Colette;
in typing class
her fingers danced across the keys,
in English class
she recited poems
without looking at the book.
She was beautiful,
and mannered in a way we weren’t,
we envied her,
my friends and I,
but still there was something broken
about Colette.
We envied how she held her head,
the way she spoke and how she dressed,
our lives were only dull gray dreams,
our dreams were all of other lives,
we came from homes where mothers cooked
and ironed shirts our fathers wore.
We did not sleep in winter coats,
we did not lodge a chair
against the bedroom door at night;
we did not know,
my friends and I,
how dark the mirror was.
Bare as born,
beautiful
in a way we weren’t,
when she lay cold in blood and glass,
we envied her, my friends and I,
we’d be our mothers soon enough
and marry men just like our dads,
we bowed our heads
and never spoke what we all knew,
marble-cold and even then
we wanted to be Colette.