Playing One on TV, Samantha Duncan
the way Buffy Summers unstuck herself
from paper doll sweaters and the male narrative flytrap.
Bookish on the seventh day of the week, brilliant on the eighth.
But all I take in is the heel to countless abdomens,
the magic of her battle-resistant hair. Sometimes, I’m happy
to be floating exotic in a cup of male gaze
and off the school bus daze, where girls ridiculed me
through their sunflower blonde sheets of rain hair
and white boys with natural red lips ignored me.
Dark and cinnamon stick-thin, I broke often,
but made sure my first adult purchase was combat
boots and a stake I keep close to the heart,
for my part as an extra in the third wave finale.
-- How to Kick-Box My Way Out of an Archetype, from Playing One on TV
About Samantha Duncan
Samantha Duncan is the author of three other poetry chapbooks, most recently The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her stories and poems have appeared in BOAAT, The Pinch, Meridian, and decomP.
She is a prose editor for Storyscape Journal, lives in Houston, and can be found at planesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com and
@SamSpitsHotFire.
