Poetry By Laura Andrea

       Franck Michel CC




Good Girls
 
Good girls who hate
being good girls stop
paying attention at church,
clutch their bony fingers
and pray for bad boys
to love them.  

Good girls who are virgins are obsessed
with the Marias and light
candles to not be the next one,
eternal, fake. Manicured.
   
Good girls who are virgins who don’t want to be
commune with Lilith, Puerto Rican Boa
and burn Christmas
trees in el campo.   

These good girls used to make love  
potions in the bathroom sink
with recipes from Barbie doll spellbooks:
a pump of pink hand soap,
six second pour of Para Mi Bebé cologne
Cetaphil bar shavings (must use fingernail)
and yellow tap water.  

These good girls fall in love with better girls:
the bad girls who stopped
going to church altogether and ran
anti-statehood Facebook groups
while dressed in all black in the dead
of Caribbean summer to signal the coven.
They learn to pray for those better girls to love  
them. They learn that if you ask God
you can be a virgin again. The trick is
to ask the right God and the right
God is no god at all.
 
The good girls meditate because that’s half
of witchcraft. They see la Virgen de la Monserrate
and their deaf great-grandmother. They cry
because their gift is hearing and the bestiary
of spells wrinkled into her homemade
sign language dies with God-
mothers who lead rosary prayers for the hearing.
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Laura Andrea is a writer from Carolina, Puerto Rico. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and is a 2023 Periplus Fellow. Her work can be found in Luna Luna Magazine, Acentos Review, and Rio Grande Review, among others. They’re the author of ‘genderbi’ (Ghost City Press, 2022) a poetry microchap, and writes the column Monsterfucker for Final Girl Bulletin Board. You can follow her day to day @lauranlora