Bloodthirsty by Puma Perl

                        Alexander Rabb CC



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Bloodthirsty

By the time we reached fifth grade 
the girls were bloodthirsty 
and the boys were predators
The popular girls looked well cared for, 
with shiny hair and protective mothers,
pony tails and pink manicures
My hair was cut at home,
with sewing scissors,
Stuck out in odd waves,
as jagged as my dirty fingernails
The teachers disliked feral children
and I was too timid to defend myself
the way a feral child should

The shiny girls sat up front
They were the teacher’s pets
but nobody hated them for it
I’d often get banished to the hall 
because of my blunt pencil
or my facial expression
On the rare occasions I talked
during class, I always got caught

I was sort of friends with two
girls on my block
Josephine and Harriet
They were a year older than I was
and knew each other from birth
Sometimes, they’d allow me
to be third wheel to their games
Other times they would run away,
leaving me standing on the sidewalk
When only one was around, 
she’d talk about the other
I knew it was a set up 
but my desire for acceptance
overwhelmed my foreknowledge 
of impending betrayal

One day, Josephine and Harriet 
sent a love letter to Richard Corso, 
the toughest guy in my class 
They signed my name at the bottom
Richard lived one street over
The next day, all the boys laughed 
and hooted when they saw me 
Josephine, the nicer girl, felt guilty
until my father came up the block
and bellowed at Harriet’s mother,
who was, as usual, leaning out the window,
and suddenly everyone was outside, 
screaming on the Brooklyn street
Josephine started crying 
and told me she hated me
Her father told my mother 
“there were two sides to the story”
Her grandmother cursed me in Italian
and just like that it was all my fault
Everyone was mad at me,
even my parents

Outsiders are easy to blame
especially when they’re innocent
Richard Corso knew the letter
was not really from me
There were too many misspelled words,
and, being the best writer in class, 
I would never have penned the words
Please call Me cherry Pie
He didn’t immediately stop his friends
from taunting me, but it blew over quickly 

We developed a weird, silent alliance
that was hard to comprehend
We didn’t speak often, 
but we knew something secretive
about one another that we couldn’t express
His family moved away the next year
Decades later, I learned that, like me,
he’d become a heroin addict
I survived, he overdosed and died

Now I understand our unspoken bond
No matter how tough or timid,
eternal outsiders recognize their own
We’re the ones standing in the hallway,
paying penance for our blunt pencils
and the pain in our pre-adolescent faces.

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Puma Perl is a poet, writer performer, and producer. She’s the author of two chapbooks, Ruby True and Belinda and Her Friends, and three full-length poetry collections, knuckle tattoos, Retrograde (great weather for MEDIA), and Birthdays Before and After (Beyond Baroque Books.) She is the creator, curator, and host of Puma’s Pandemonium, which brings spoken word together with rock and roll. As Puma Perl and Friends, she performs regularly with a group of excellent musicians. She’s received three awards from the New York Press Association in recognition of her journalism and was the recipient of the 2016 Acker Award in the category of writing.
Photo, David Godlis

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