Lola Dekhuijzen

Pop!

My daughter and I are both sixteen. She’s chewing on something
that shouldn’t be this pink and tells me about the boy she’ll
probably marry. This week, it’s Jake. Vince is so yesterday,
she pushes her gum-balloon over the edge for dramatic effect.
She begs me to come along, a token gesture, but a well-played
one. She’ll clean my room and paint my walls my favorite shade
of purple. She’ll make a magic potion and sneak it into the bottle
of my crush (she doesn’t know it’s Jake). I take one look at myself
in the mirror. Oversized The Neighbourhood hoodie. Drooping hair.
The black on my nails looks like an exercise in tasseography,
or a knock-off Rorschach. I swallow the shame and tell her
to become an actress. As if to make sure at least one of us
won’t accidentally slip into shadow and unlearn how
to come back.

Lola Dekhuijzen is a poet from Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in Anthropocene, Lighthouse, Abridged and elsewhere. She will soon begin an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast.

Lola said this about her poem:

 This poem is a little time machine, moving both forward and backward as the speaker inhabits their teenage self and interacts with an imagined teenage daughter. In some way, the poem traces a timeline of shame, moving between what I picture to be a pink bedroom out of a 00s movie to something darker. I did not want the poem to resolve, but rather to capture the tension between withdrawal and expression.