The Boys

Talk fish. When you ask if you can 
borrow a rod and they think you say ride,

there’s only one answer. No—you can 
ride along, sit at the lake’s edge and 

acclimate to this world in which girls don’t fish. 
Watch the boys cast, dip, spit. Walk away 

over rumpled hills, squat and piss. 
Think of being lost. When you return,

the boys will say they were worried. But you know
they’d have found you, fanning out over the hills

the way they’d look for a young, dumb calf. 
Going home, caught in the back of someone’s 

car, one puts his arm around your shoulder,
a hook in your mouth, hand on your breast.