What’s Lurking in the Friend Zone, The Molting, & Unresolved by Irina Frolova

Aug 22

Aug 22 What’s Lurking in the Friend Zone, The Molting, & Unresolved by Irina Frolova

Baby Teeth Journal

Poetry

What’s Lurking in the Friend Zone

I bet he thought he was a nice guy.

Friendly and attentive. Nice to talk to.

For a while there

I used to think so too.

Until his attention, creeping

into the late hours of the night,

followed me to bed, like a ghost

of good intentions.

Message after message. Oversharing

at a rate proportional to my unease.

He might as well have sent a dick pic.

But, of course

it was all a misunderstanding. Yes,

he is married but not all married men

are husbands. Some are more like flat-mates,

as good as single!

He had misunderstood

my signals: awkward pauses, changes of topic.

He is not a mind reader, after all

women are such mysteries

to be unraveled, one defensive layer

at a time, ever so nicely.

The Molting

Wait till you turn forty,

they say. It’s like magic.

You.Just.Stop.Caring.

I am well on my way

shedding old skin,

scale by scale,

marvelling at its thinness.

Good-bye, second-guessing.

Or guessing at all

what people might think of me.

What they do is enough.

So long, size small,

you dainty thing,

taking up as little space

outside my head as deemed desirable.

Fuck off, fuckability.

What did you ever do for me?

you were only really fun for my,

as it turned out, insignificant others.

A pair of tight jeans

does not make me feel like hot shit

alive with sex appeal

and “self-love”. Or was it lust?

Love feels much quieter,

like mid-autumn sun

savoured over a coffee,

between all the things I have to be.

I jump into writing with both feet,

the kind of passion

between me and the world

where time consists not of minutes

but ideas, bitter-sweet

in their vastness.

Unresolved

I want to move on

from the middle of this nowhere

to other eyes, hands, lips.

But I also want to stay,

muddy the waters,

make it seem like there is more

there.

Make you wonder

where I was last weekend,

who I did last night; search

my body for hints,

look to it for validation

of your relevance. Dig deep

for the foundation of us.

Is it being eroded

bit by bit, the way my hope in its wild form

was sculptured, trimmed, smoothed

to finally fit neatly

into a small square

somewhere in the far corner

of your calendar, never in pen.

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