"Wheelhouse" by Lindy Giusta
Poetry
Wheelhouse
An amateur narrative-documentary anxiety-special spins around my brain like a scratched and broken record for as long as I can remember.
The tracks to my life album were diverse, but boil down to similar thematic elements:
…….like?
……that unending dread of the routine fluoride treatment in my Kindergarten class, swish upon swish of that foul taste that would not leave my five years of lived experience alone. I would think about it weeks before the tiny white cup would come in contact with my little, thin 5-year-old lips.
……the timed mile in Jr. High made my hormone-ridden body feel ill-prepared, which was the perfect food for overactive neurons to eat their starved selves to abundance. God-dammit-don’t time my teen body running. I’m not ready, I will never be ready for that.
….. the countless sleepless nights listening to dirty 90’s R&B, thinking equally dirty thoughts, with candle-lit desperations and incantations to the dark side. I could attest to the antidote of “letting one’s imagination run wild,” it became a pack of wolves howling at every phase of the moon cycle.
…. the existential dread of being stuffed in a too-tight dress going to church on a Sunday, even though it was only Monday and churchgoing happened yesterday. I knew it would happen again, every week, clockwork.
I could not stop the firing and hardwiring, the patterns of any well-respected seamstress would have gleefully abandoned.
I moved to New York, where there are seasons, which now move quickly in my adult years, as does my ability to flow with the tracks.
But that little person later turned teenager, now turned into some form of an adult, wants to embrace the upcoming November and tell that little person that things ease up, even if it’s a white lie, it could become a new reality.
About the Poet:
Lindy is a queer multi-media and multi-disciplinarian creative artist. While their main focus has been on visual arts these past 8 years, they also adore writing and have been dipping their toes back into falling in love with the art form and writing more consistently. Eventually, they would love to write a memoir graphic novel which is the next plan in the works!
