White cotton training bra, white cotton shirt

The first day of school is a big deal when you’re young

Even if you’re not starting 6th grade at Scott Highland, or coming in mid-year in a new state, with a “ lazy eyelid” (for fuck’s sake they never even told you it had a legit medical diagnosis) and a Münchausen syndrome-esque mother –

you could see the fucking fear in her eyes every time you left for school in the morning

– and you were supposed to believe you’d be ok out there!

(As a 42 year old grad student in Advanced Clinical Practice with Children and Adolescents, I sat in the front row so no one could see me crying at the Attachment Theory slides – well no one except the instructor…but she knew…she new the ball wasn’t fairly tossed back to me back in the old days.)

When it’s August on the bus in Minnesota or November in Illinois, and the boys can see your bra

you don’t know that Kill Bill and Natural Born Killers will come out in just a few years and say – for you –

“Hey you self righteous suburban white boys!

with your white pressed shirts…”

(I wish I could go back in time and drop you by helicopter and a rope, straight down into the afternoon west side neighborhoods where I used to buy crack)

“…your obedient female sidekicks, sitting next to you on the bus, with their white pressed “fascist panties”!

I am Uma with a Hatori Hanzo, you mother fuckers! I am Mallory with a gun!! I am a better white man standing behind his love his nice girl

I am Micky smiling

and you are the devastating journalist abusing father ruthless Lucy Lu defeated

Dead!

You are not even less now!…

on the bleachers during the slow songs

You are not even alive.

Why?

Because in the end I win. In the end Quentin Tarantino and Kurt Cobain are the ones remembered – not your better seats at the back of the bus.

Not the comfort you had going into that school, that girls like me never had.

We actually believed you were kings and queens and letting us till your soil so we could eat your potatoes.

Where are your potatoes now, your Highness?

That is our soil you sleep in. It was never yours.

They won’t even know you were here.