Genevieve DeGuzman’s work appears or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, FIVE:2:ONE, FOLIO, LONTAR, Reed Magazine, Strange Horizons, Switchback, and elsewhere. She is a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2017 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize, and a winner of the 2017 Oregon Poetry Association’s New Poets Contest. She was born in the Philippines, grew up in Southern California, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. ---------
Xylophone
He was crossing the meadow when he saw her
on the bluff, legs tucked under
a blue dress, the image of the painted Wyeth girl
but brighter.
He waited for a moment like this all summer, idle
encounter he could use to talk to her
at last. In their eighth grade class, he kept
his distance, pocketed goodluck trinkets to keep:
How she walked barefoot on the grass,
the way her bracelets jangled on her wrists, her knobby
elbows when she pulled her black hair
back in a ponytail, revealing another one now:
clavicles, hers. Elegant ballerina
bones she wore so well that he muttered the word
“Xylophone.” Just a few stylish syllables
light on his tongue, lighting into
what he wished for: “Xylophone.”
Banter of hellos through a tyranny of teeth
his words the mallets tapping off-
key on collared harmonicon bars, until she stepped
toward him. The music in her knowing laugh enough
to run the scales for him, to sing the encounter.