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by Karla Lamb A woman pinned under a man in a movie my babysitter makes me watch. Playing dolls at Leah’s, her dad’s nude photos spread out on their kitchen table in Los Angeles. A family friend’s big cock peering out the bottom side of his bathing suit, lounging in Huntington Beach. A forced first kiss jumping on the bed in the room where Papa died of brain cancer. Red food dye in the toilet pretending to bleed in Mexico City. Rhea’s hand inside my overalls in the dark auditorium at the fifth grade assembly. When hide-and-seek turns into kissing cousins behind the couch in Laguna Beach. Old men with smeared grins & binoculars staring in Oaxaca. A guy bumping up against me during the middle school field trip to The Art Institute of Chicago. When the condom brakes & I cry like a baby in a Holland Heights basement. When Yani gets scabies & doesn’t say anything for weeks. Learning strip poker in an abandoned house on Fifteenth Street. Waking up to Olas inside me at the Halloween party. Puking in the parking lot of the abortion clinic in Grand Rapids. Smells like pussy hammers in my head.  photo by Maranie Rae Photography Karla Lamb is a multidisciplinary Chicana poet & artist. Her work has appeared in A Women’s Thing Magazine, Coal Hill Review, Vox Populi, Word Riot, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Uppagus, Rogue Agent, and Voices from the Attic anthology. Lamb earned an MFA from Carlow University, and is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript. Lamb lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she works as a program manager for City of Asylum, an organization that provides sanctuary to endangered writers. She has edited for After Happy Hour Review, and can usually be found collaborating with various artists and writers. karlalamb.com Comments are closed.
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