by Danni Quintos
The Girl I Want to Be
I am done being a middle schooler
but I don’t know if I’m ready to be
a teenager. I spend the summer
practicing eyeliner & reading magazines
with advice for how to be the girl
I want to be. I picture myself
in this season’s new two-piece bathing
suits. I imagine metallic eyeshadow across
my lids & picture a party scene like the movies
I watch where I look so hot that everyone
stops & stares, or I jump up on the table
and dance to Notorious BIG’s Juicy
before hitting my head on the chandelier.
I want to grow out my hair & wear contacts
so I can be the girl who transformed
over the summer, the one no one knew
was so gorgeous under those glasses.
But I don’t want to like everyone. Something
in me still wants to be feared, a little mean,
like a raspberry vine’s thorns, a sharp
surprise for anyone who tries me.
Hometown
Here it’s horse country, to the point
where all the hotel rooms have paintings
or huge, blown-up photos of horses—
their velvety muscles in sharp focus.
Murals downtown, street names, iron
statues shellacked with rain & frozen
in racing action. Everyone cares about
the derby & has seen it at least through
the TV’s glass. Everyone’s been to a racetrack,
seen beers go warm in their translucent plastic
cups, forgotten. Everyone’s driven on that road
that circles town called Man-O-War & never
really thought how odd it is to name a church
after it too—Man-O-War Church of God.
After a road, after a horse.
Horse People
My parents aren’t horse people. That doesn’t mean half-horse
half-person, it means people who go to the races, who bet on them
& collect brass horse head bookends, who own paintings of horses
and twice a year head to the track in town called Keeneland
for warm spring or early fall sunshine days of sunglasses & pastel blazers,
sundresses & caramel-color dress shoes, cigar smoke billowing
across the stands. I’ve been there once with a friend when I was little
and noticed how out of place I felt, even as a kid. Her dad bought
us nachos with plasticky cheese and we watched the horses
mess up the mud with their giant hooves, we watched clean-shaven
men get too drunk and turn pink with yelling. They let me pick
two horses for my bet and they both lost. I dropped my ticket
on the wet concrete, its potential to be worth more than just paper
was gone. I couldn’t wait until it was time to go home.
Fall News
It’s the end of the summer: a dark, overcast
day like the sun didn’t bother to get out of bed.
Mom sits me down & says she’s leaving.
She’s got her hair wrapped in a towel,
she’s wearing her old pink bathrobe
like she couldn’t wait until she was dressed.
Snot fills my nose & my eyes burn.
I ask where she’s going, but she can’t
talk right now, a phone call. The next
thing, her eyes focused ahead & not
hardly towards me. I don’t remember
when her things disappeared, but
suddenly they weren’t.
My Parents Are
the kind who never volunteered for the PTA
or chaperoned field trips. Always working ‘til 5 at least
and sometimes later, longer, on call on holidays: Thanksgiving
and the phone rings and Dad has to put on his boots.
I never got to do the weekend team sports or dance classes,
the children’s theater, girl scouts. I was just a kid at home
on a Saturday, drawing pictures of dead flowers, collecting
rocks & cicada shells, reading about planets and space dust.
My parents, when they were together, never were friends with other
kids’ parents. When I was in 5th grade I got in trouble for a messy desk:
all the bulletins & announcements & sign ups meant for my parents
were shoved to the back of the desk until they became a wall, a dam,
a build-up of forgotten invitations my parents didn’t want to throw away.
Now that they’re split up it’s just Dad, busier than ever. I decide
he has enough going on trying to pay all the bills and get over
the divorce. I decide he doesn’t need to know all the questions
the school asks him, the fundraisers, the volunteer invitations. The bright
yellow sheet that says, Join the PTA! stays wrinkled & smushed
at the bottom of my backpack, next to some broken pencils
and a granola bar wrapper.
Excerpted from Mercy No Mercy, a YA novel-in-verse.
Danni Quintos is the author of the poetry collection Two Brown Dots (BOA Editions, 2022), chosen by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as winner of the Poulin Poetry Prize. A Kentuckian, a knitter, and an Affrilachian Poet, her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review, The Margins, Salon, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a YA novel-in-verse entitled, Mercy No Mercy.