Matte

“Ray” by Molly Phalan

One night you told some girl
you’d met

that you had loved me
for five years
and she said, well,

why are you talking
to me then,
and I got mad. We weren’t

a love thing, I said
later, you can’t make this
into that.

I wore halter-tops
from Wal-Mart
and matte powder

on my face. In all the pictures
I have left
I am a ghost.

Who was that girl
made out of
things left outside

parties — old blue sweatshirts
and those cutoff shorts

that never fit me right? Who
did she love?

Now my face
is a white mask
filling with air.

I’m putting pictures
into bottles at the beach,

feeding tides
like starving lambs.

Here:

me in my college dorm room,
and then here:

you outside Vegas with the wind
filling your shirt.

Here, a last one:
our blurred faces, halfway
outside of the shot

and the world
a vague dark blur

spreading between us.

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and works as a librarian. She also co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks, Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight, are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing (for free!) respectively.