First published in Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta!, 2007
Yvette Wuz Here
On bathroom walls and doors of stalls: Yvette Wuz Here.
She is everywhere. On inside covers of high school textbooks
her whole name blue ink penned and flirty in the roundest cursive,
the Os in her last name like the loopty-loop ride at Riverside.
You can tell she was all cotton candy pink lipstick and fingernail polish.
No doubt she was cute. The wooden bleachers out behind the school
showcase her prophecies—Together Forever and For Always.
The backs of school chairs are scarred with her Yvette Plus and
Yvette Loves. She affixed her name to guys dubbed Tiny and Fuzz
and Country and Red who must've fought over her in school hallways,
pummeled their fists into faces, getting themselves expelled, missing
the prom—and the myth of that night—with Yvette, the girl who got down
under cafeteria tables to autograph the underside, bet that's where
she'd hide, during lunchtime, from lovers who skipped class to find her, to cross-
examine her, ask "Where were you on the day of…?" and "With who?" But her
alibi is all over the place, written in marker or ink pen or etched in wood: Yvette Wuz Here.
Is there a real Yvette this is based off of?
ReplyDeleteThis is based on the names I saw written on bathroom walls and bus stop shelters. The poem came to me though when I saw the name Yvette + someone written on a bus stop shelter bench. I never met this Yvette, but I wrote a poem about her. I gave her a backstory.
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