Before I knew I wasn’t a girl by Ren Wilding

I went on a date with a straight man. His voice, when I was with him,
an echo in an empty hallway. I wasn’t there. He worked in a warehouse.
I was in grad school, trying not to assume we’d have nothing to say.
When we parted, I said I didn’t text, still had a phone with no keyboard.
I asked him to an exhibit at the city library, as if putting him in a room
with art would make me feel like a girl. He told me maybe, so I went
alone. I was a collage undone, pieces flaking out of the frame, caught
by another with glue still wet, unfinished. He texted, what are you
doing later? I pressed the numbers to spell stop and I can’t, the answers
to my own questions.



Ren Wilding earned an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri. Their work appears in Braving the Body, Comstock Review, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Tulip Tree, and Zoetic Press, and others. They received a Pushcart nomination and are co-curator of the “Words Like Blades” series.