GIRLISH GESTURES

When I was 12 to 15 I started mimicking girlish gestures…I would do this in private…in auntie’s attic…late at night…wearing things purloined from her drawers…looking through magazines and catalogues in the striped arc light coming through the attic vent… trying to hold my fingers just so as if to put on an earring, or to cross my legs like so, sort of theatrically posed, or to stand over a subway grate with my white dress blowing upward as I tried to hold it down just like Marylin Monroe…sans the subway grate and white dress…but with my feet in her high heels parted as if…