To the woman behind the counter at the bakery:
I’d like to think that were we not in a bakery, that is, your place of work, I would be the first in what I can only assume is a long line of queer women falling at your feet and penning love poetry. As it is, I will never know the courage it would take to walk up to you and ask for your number. As it is, I will only ever know you as bakery babe.
Or, more accurately, the femme presenting short haired person behind the counter at Sweet Tartlette who smiled at me for half a second while taking my order and in doing so inspired an influx of imagined intimacy. But for the sake of ease, I will call you bakery babe.
Who am I to cut off bits of your identity for the sake of ease, you might ask me, bakery babe. And I have no good answer. I am a queer and bumbling girl who liked your smile, bakery babe, and nothing else. Might I have been something else, had I not met you at your place of work? I really don’t know, bakery babe.
A lot of that depends on if you’re interested in me, bakery babe. Does my curling dark hair strike at the tinder of your imagination too, bakery babe? Will you go home and regale your friends with the tale of the striking customer who held your eye for a moment too long while ordering her pecan pie?
Maybe the bigger question, bakery babe, is if you’re interested in women at all. Are you queer, bakery babe? What did your parents say when you came out to them? Were you just a child, fresh out of the people-grinding middle school hallways? Did they wrap soothing sentences around your tear stained face? Did they tell you that you were silly to think that they would love you any less? Before you left the room, bakery babe, did you glance back to catch them exchanging a worried look? Did the worried look rub you with anxiety, bakery babe? Could you find the strength within yourself to believe their worried looks to be an imagined nothing?
And what about your old best friend, bakery babe? The one, you know who I mean, who you met in first grade, and from then on, got on like a house on fire. Only, when you got to high school did she she meet a boy? Was she so infatuated she never wanted to talk about anything else, even you, anymore? Did you cry when you walked in on them making out on your own bed? Or was it when she caught you staring at the tantalizing curves of the star of the field hockey team, playfully slapped you on the shoulder and called you a dyke? Did you believe the smile on her lips when she told you nothing would change after you came out? Or because you had known her for years on end, could you tell when she lied, even to herself? How many times did her answering machine pick up before you got the message, bakery babe? How did you mourn her loss?
Was it hard to get this job for yourself, bakery babe? Did you shy away from the hungry look your interviewer gave you across the counter? Did you wince when he listed personable as a prerequisite to employment? Did you square your shoulders and smile back without a second thought? Did you imagine the cost of your college text books before you leaned into your interviewer's leer and said you always prioritized the customer?
How many men have hit on you from across the counter of the Tartlette, bakery babe? Do your coworkers nudge you under the ribs and tell you to be friendlier to the men who tip so sparingly? Do they tell you that the one with the good jawline who left his number is the cutest boy they’ve seen on this side of the great lakes? Do they ever question why you don’t call the dozens of men and boys who left their number? Why don’t they also understand how awful it is to be hit on at work? Aren’t they also women, bakery babe? Does it become harder to find that solidarity every day that they go on about their boyfriends? When they tell you their boyfriends, they very boys who delighted in your torment in high school are the cutest, most sensitive type of boy? How many extraneous details could you tell me about your co-worker’s boyfriends, bakery babe? How many days in a row have you gone without passing the Bechdel test?
Do you write poetry, bakery babe? Do you scribble it down in that little blue notebook you always carry or on the back of receipts and napkins when you have nothing else? Do you construct couplets while you work? When you and your co-workers are up to your elbows in dough and flour and mixed local berries do you write metaphors about the already over sexualized female form? Do you pride yourself on being able to tell the difference between ‘iambic’ and ‘polemic’ but use ‘raven tresses’ to describe a lover’s black hair anyway? Do you rhyme ‘my true love’ with ‘the angles above’ because it was convenient? Do you think that ‘the stars shone in her eyes’ is the truest sentence you could ever write?
Bakery babe, do you know what love is? Have you ever tried to climb on a roof, just to sing literally from the roof tops? Have you ever known with certainty that you couldn’t hit a note if it climbed in front of you and sat still but still let the sound go, from the bottom of your lungs, because you wanted your voice to feel as free as the rest of you? Do you know what it’s like to have a name on the tip of your tongue as you fall asleep, bakery babe? To hold the name, or maybe names on your tongue when you wake up. To hold it in your head all day, no matter what else is happened. To hold them as gently as a sun-gold tomato, so as not to bruise or split them. To hold them as tightly as a frightened bird, terrified they might fly away. To want to die for them, to live for them, to live with them? Do you know how desperate that feels? Did it feel more desperate to you because the love you felt was forbidden? Did you treasure that forbidden ache more because at least you felt something? Were there countless nights you sat under the blankets in your childhood bed and cried yourself to sleep or do you just write that in your poetry? Do you know how long you have to cry to cry yourself to sleep, bakery babe?
Bakery babe, do you think this poem is about you? Do you hear this poem years later, in an audience at a coffee shop in Vancouver and clutch the hand of your lover next to you a little tighter. Do you whisper this poem to yourself at home under a fleece blanket into your chamomile tea? Have you bookmarked this poem, bakery babe, so that you can reread it when the winter nights stretch on for so long you're not sure when the morning will come? Does this poem make you smile with a fond nostalgia for your younger self, bakery babe? Or does it just make you miss home?
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