Poem for the New Year? - Kristina Haynes

I keep trying to write the most important poem.
About boys who stay away and the mothers 
who find themselves loving them despite 
their vacant beds. About sad songs that are 
beginning to skip because they’re played too often. 
About hunger and frustration and nostalgia 
and sadness. About the things I always talk about. 
I run around town in black tights and black heels 
doing errands and trying to look important, adult. 
I kiss the faces of strangers hard enough to leave 
craters behind, forget to take my birth control 
but it’s not like I’m having sex so what’s the big deal? 
Everything is a question. Everything is like I’m 
eleven again, taking out a hand mirror, studying 
the new parts of myself. How spooked I was 
to realize I was becoming a woman, my mother’s eyes 
in my face, my father’s nose and lips beneath. When 
I was younger I couldn’t keep track of how often 
strangers would thumb my face, talk about my eyes, 
touch my braided hair. Say, “how pretty.” Say, 
“aren’t you just the most precious thing?” I haven’t 
been touched like that in years. The strangers 
stay away, but there is a bed across town 
that I know better than my own.

—	Kristina Haynes, “Poem for the New Year?”