Test
by Sara Fetherolf
Late September in the art bathroom I pee on it
and wait.
I still think about the desert, how
one day, name changed, telling no one, I might go
where nights there’s nothing between me
and the stars, they’ll drool all over
my unhooded head, and maybe
it’s how this month I’ve been coming up
with names, but I’m worried there’s a reason
for that old get-out urge beating in me—isn’t it a sign
I’m like every woman-bodied
thing with a secret room
a universe can start inside
on accident, a chamber
with a Tesla coil, big bang simulation
hall, and I can’t help what sets it
going? Across the way
I hear every charcoal in the life drawing
class whisper a body to the sketch board, I hear
one woman lean closer
to get the shadow of the neck right,
and the sweet red growl
of the nude’s stomach; I hear her thinking
about the apple she left with her clothes,
and then it comes—
one blue
line, two—
three blocks away, in my
apartment I left
a pot on the stove—the egg
cracks, smoking—here
in the brown paper quiet the code
signals I’m no mother. My hands shake
with something I can’t name under hot water.
and wait.
I still think about the desert, how
one day, name changed, telling no one, I might go
where nights there’s nothing between me
and the stars, they’ll drool all over
my unhooded head, and maybe
it’s how this month I’ve been coming up
with names, but I’m worried there’s a reason
for that old get-out urge beating in me—isn’t it a sign
I’m like every woman-bodied
thing with a secret room
a universe can start inside
on accident, a chamber
with a Tesla coil, big bang simulation
hall, and I can’t help what sets it
going? Across the way
I hear every charcoal in the life drawing
class whisper a body to the sketch board, I hear
one woman lean closer
to get the shadow of the neck right,
and the sweet red growl
of the nude’s stomach; I hear her thinking
about the apple she left with her clothes,
and then it comes—
one blue
line, two—
three blocks away, in my
apartment I left
a pot on the stove—the egg
cracks, smoking—here
in the brown paper quiet the code
signals I’m no mother. My hands shake
with something I can’t name under hot water.
Sara Fetherolf’s poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Salamander, A Women’s Thing, The Raleigh Review, and Iron Horse, among other journals; she has critical essays in The California Journal of Poetics and forthcoming from Plath Profiles. She holds an MFA degree from Hunter College, and is currently a Dornsife Fellow in the PhD for Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California.