"poem" broadside #338 : poem for z-­girl, by jenna jarvis

1. i wonder if girl is a gender distinct from woman, meaning, i wonder if this concept can transcend fatphobia, or a cultural distaste for post­pubescent, soft­enough female bodies

2. i understand, to the best of my ability, the implications of the story i’m telling, though i acknowledge that i don’t understand the implications of my corpus

3. on tumblr, i saw a scan of a black­and­white photograph. this is in itself the meaty part. it’s strange to see black­and­white film photography on social media during the long twenty­first century. photography developed on black­and­white film used to be my tool for tracing a line in the sand between me and the next generation. if your parents don’t have any black­and­white photos of you, then you’re young & stupid. now i think of it, i was drawing a line between whose parents could afford colour film and whose couldn’t

4. she’s carrying a skateboard with her left hand, she’s wearing a helmet & highwaisted jeans, or are they highwaisted shorts? is that a catcher’s mitt or a gardening glove? it’s on her right hand, obviously, because her skateboard is on her left. does she ride goofy? her kneepads have some sort of logo on them

i thought the pads were roses on her kneecaps

5. duono if it’s the 1970s or the 90s all night radio guitars strangle sleep­deprived we share circumstance not space homelike suburban aching

6. we should be so lucky, us unbound left­handed girls

poem for z-­girl

by jenna jarvis

produced for the ottawa small press book fair,

June 17-18, 2016

above/ground press broadside #338

jenna jarvis is a poet and a barista. her writing has appeared in puritan magazine and keep this bag away from children, as well as in various zines and microblogs.