Shelley earned an MFA in computer art and street cred in hip-hop. An emerging writer in Berlin, she can be found sipping tea in her chapel and cemetery, writing in violet with a brass fountain pen. She is a UX writer and has once voiced a vibrator ad for couples. Shelley is from South Louisiana.
evenings, i would sit on the widow’s walk and listen to foghorns drift from the mississippi. i could see five church steeples from my perch if i turned around.
that apartment was like a treehouse. i came home to find my stripper subletter had strung her thongs facing the street, as if to spread coochie christmas cheer in summer. i was mortified. then she stole my heating pad.
the elderly neighbor’s kite-like laundry inspired me to write. six blue socks / slump in the sky… a poem for my young students to record.
those years were shaped by my obsession. magnets in the same field that didn’t meet. wearing an oval-set ring with no gem. biking and breaking into a voodoo practicioner’s abandoned house for the scenery, where i’d shoot self-portraits when the oral hormones made my breasts bigger.
it was also a time when, like in bordello photos now yellowed, striped stockings were back in fashion. i tinted mine in tea and paired a velvet choker. not that i wanted to be a sex worker, but for historical allure. many punks turned to this aesthetic—men in pageboy hats and suspenders riding tall bikes and jousting.
i was in a vaudeville dance troupe with startlingly bruised women. did they fall into bathtubs while distilling gin? we were way past prohibition. i didn’t question. one dancer affected a husky voice, “you’ve been to jail, haven’t ya?” yes, of course (i had not, at that point, been to jail).
the dance troupe leader had a blue tooth. it was a fake tooth on a retainer backed by a silverish material which bled through the enamel and appeared blue, the color of truth. a friend borrowed my stockings and never returned them. people always stole my clothes. it was around this time i started to realize how juvenile we all were.
ever before me was my fantasy. i thought if i worked hard, maybe we’d meet. he was inside me as a battery when i could use it. years would pass before i could put him behind me. it was a question of reality. actually, he was never behind me, he was just locked out, like in a spaceship airlock around my brain. i actively disciplined myself to pretend he didn’t exist.
i had idle time because my obsession with him caused me to lose my job. i’d written too freely, hoping he’d see. i wanted him to know me, come to me. i lost sight of common sense.
in the elevator up to a session with my shrink, a woman informed me that my hem was undone. only able to blink, i stared blankly at the door. she was not part of my reality, and neither was the seam.
my professional fall from grace came just before my true expression.
some nights a friend would set up an amp and guitar on the widow’s walk and play noise to the garden district. he was doomed to die from bad habits, and this he unfortunately did.
many friends passed the pink stained glass as they climbed to my attic apartment. looking out of french doors into the coming morning, i’d be tickled to see a blue-wigged friend in a tee that would not return. a fun few danced before an oily sky, stirring daiquiris and booties on that balcony. humidity hugged our crew like the sunny ravers we were.
the landlord stripped the victorian and repainted it from blush to custard. i unclothed my soul via verse. it was an era of reinvention.
i’ve come to think we’re all strippers of sorts—selling sexy to a buyer, shedding. or holding a strong pole, falling for the pull.
Volume 16.2, Summer 26
Shelley Pellegrin
