Another Audition for the Role of Bisexual
by Kate Stoltzfus
You’re in lights again. It’s one year
or it’s another. You forget
how many feelings can choke
your body. Your lines won’t come out
of your mouth. This isn’t a play.
You rehearse so much. You try on the word
baby. It makes you cry. How light it is.
You’re standing at a worn monument’s edge,
holding your tongue with both hands
like a lost fish. It’s one year, or another:
Back then, hands on bikes
by the unseeable quill of Potomac,
every swilled inhale told you
to leak the thoughts pulsing
like swollen sand in your teeth.
Just say it: her ear, once measured
tip of lobe to curving helix,
waiting. One year. Then another.
Now you’re kissing
everyone. Less afraid
they won’t kiss back. And still,
alone, you conjure her for practice:
enter left, inky light, the click
of spokes in shadow. Baby,
she says, coming
right to your chin, licking
its pointed question, baby,
I already know.
or it’s another. You forget
how many feelings can choke
your body. Your lines won’t come out
of your mouth. This isn’t a play.
You rehearse so much. You try on the word
baby. It makes you cry. How light it is.
You’re standing at a worn monument’s edge,
holding your tongue with both hands
like a lost fish. It’s one year, or another:
Back then, hands on bikes
by the unseeable quill of Potomac,
every swilled inhale told you
to leak the thoughts pulsing
like swollen sand in your teeth.
Just say it: her ear, once measured
tip of lobe to curving helix,
waiting. One year. Then another.
Now you’re kissing
everyone. Less afraid
they won’t kiss back. And still,
alone, you conjure her for practice:
enter left, inky light, the click
of spokes in shadow. Baby,
she says, coming
right to your chin, licking
its pointed question, baby,
I already know.
Kate Stoltzfus (she/her) is a poetry candidate at the University of Arkansas’ MFA program in creative writing and translation and the 2024-25 assistant managing editor for The Arkansas International. A former journalist and editor specializing in K-12 education, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Journal, and elsewhere.