drunk girl songs

I'm addicted to drunk girls
who throw up on their 21st birthdays.
The way they hover over toilets,
snotty, projectile vomit forcing through
the basins on her small stomach. She purges
all the painful layers of adolescence
to leave her butterfly body.

She is broken. Her hands are on the ground,
holding up the weight oh her mother's voice,
"A cold washcloth and an aspirin. That'll do
The trick." Her shoulder blades rounded up
like mountains afraid of the sky. These
are her growing wings.

Her forehead is on the backs on her hands.
With the pounding of her father's voice,
"This is what you wanted. Suck it up!"
Her spine is a raised railroad track that
gets lost in the tunnel of her spaghetti strap.
Here lies her courage.

Yet she cries like smallness in a big world.
She apologizes for being weak, not ready
for performance in the world stage.
She cries and apologizes in
the embrace of an echoey bathroom

And to my listening ears. I stroke her back
and hand her tissue until the box runs out.
I am beside her, her sob songs in my ear:

Songs of girls who grow into women too soon,
These songs of battered women,
songs of her period, songs of leaving
her family for her husband's home,
songs of shame, songs of feeling ugly
and not enough, the song of her first daughter,
songs of her dead mother, songs so deep
they fill the hallows of honeycombs.

These 21 year old drunk girls hold
the music collection of our women's souls.
They hold it in the deepest pit, reverberating
in the toilet bowl. Alcohol happens to be the key
that unlock these songs of being a girl.