“Puberty” by Kika Dorsey
1.
She held her white rabbit-foot keychain in her pocket. Her mother gave it to her for her birthday. It was good luck, she said. The daughter was eleven. She didn’t need keys. She needed soft fur on her fingers, though. She needed her mother to tell her why she bled, why she had to stuff herself with white cotton, why her belly hurt so much. Her mother brewed her chamomile tea. It tasted like something you shouldn’t drink, like bark that should have been roasted.
2.
She was good at cartwheels. At school, she was the lead cheerleader because she could do an aerial cartwheel. She would practice in the backyard with a ramp her father built her. The day she could do it without it, her family celebrated with blueberries from Michigan topped with whipped cream.
3.
She knew the taste of blood. It was metallic like the ring on her keychain. She had a rabbit in a hutch beside their house. He was black and named Harvey. Her father had chosen the name after a talking rabbit from a film with James Stewart. She changed the straw in his hutch every day, and sometimes she brought him into the living room and sat on the brown leather sofa and scratched his back and neck. His ears were like feathers, so soft.
4.
When she did an aerial cartwheel, it felt like how a key can fit perfectly even though it was jagged, all angles like her body. Sometimes she wondered how she could hold Harvey to her chest and save what he never lost, his black feet, not white as cotton. Sometimes she bled, but her mother always promised her the blood would return to her spinning body, how it knew to go where it had never gone before, how it knew to unlock doors.
About Kika Dorsey
She/Her/Hers
Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and her books include the chapbook Beside Herself and three full-length collections: Rust, Coming Up for Air, and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger, which won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of Colorado in literature and creative writing. Her novel, As Joan Approaches Infinity is published by Gesture Press in 2023. In addition, she works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free-time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.