POEM — At the PTA

A part of me is just trying

to get back to Good.

 

And then, there is that part of me

well-imprinted by my parents

confident in her own belonging.

 

Here I am!

 

but my remorse

for the time being

overshadows my pride,

 

my sense of civic duty

is temporarily

drowned by my shame.

 

The Good People

are filtered into the room

 

smiling, nodding, identical

fixed countenance

(as if agreed upon

at an earlier meeting)

 

perhaps while I was busy

in the basement

getting fucked.

 

I uncross my legs

and re-cross them

in the other direction

 

and the creak of my boots

betray their pleather origins

 

“Get Out!”

cry my boots

 

and I look around the group

for a ‘second’ to this motion.

 

Who else knows it’s all a façade,

as plastic as my boots?

 

It’s fun to play masquerade

to bluff my way past the door

 

to hold court amidst the jesters

like me.

 

Mumbled regrets

as I stand and back away

from the collapsible chair.

 

This is no place

for a girl like me;

restitution will have to be made

in some other way.

*

Alma Mobly is a writer and a dreamer who inhabits strange places, strangest of all inside her own head.