she can put on the dress her mother picks out, the
navy blue short-sleeved bodice long, dropping
past her waist to meet the plaid, pleated skirt
skimming mid-thigh. Plaid she translates to
tartan, skirt to kilt; the blue and green and yellow
of clan Campbell, not Macmillan. Not the name
of the old couple she is instructed to call
auntmaryandunclebob, their disdain for
deodorant making them smell worse than their
rheumy-eyed dog. Though the desert is
transformed into the highlands, it is still too hot
for knee socks and the yellow slash of her Girl
Scout garter flashes. Never mind her wish for an
antlered sgian-dubh befitting a laird. The s in she
shrugged off. Do you know how embarrassing it
was for your father and me to learn you were the
only girl taken to the principal’s office for
throwing rocks? Every army needs its artillery.
And they were dirt clods, not rocks. The closet
doesn’t allow every day to be Scottish; the red
shirt dress with the Nehru collar becomes the
tunic of a Roman soldier; the brown dress, his
leather breastplate and slashed apron. Blanche
Ann knows the Romans aren’t always the heroes;
t-shirt and shorts on Saturdays are Spartacus.
Bending over, she traces the white pucker of a
scar on her left knee where she picked off the
white-rimmed purple scab to test its thickness
with her teeth. The questions curdle in her
stomach: How to become Kirk Douglas? How to
catch Jean Simmons’s gaze?

Poet and book artist Bonné de Blas is working toward her MFA in poetry at Kent State University in collaboration with the NEOMFA program where she teaches writing composition and creative writing. She received an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and a JD from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She is the author of two chapbooks The Act of Dwelling (NightBallet Press) and The Rule of Contraction (Kattywompus Press), and her poems and essays appear in the anthologies What I Knew Before I Knew (Pudding House Press), Lipsmack! (NightBallet Press), and Older Queer Voices: The Intimacy of Survival, Lambert and Einstein, eds. (olderqueervoices.com) for which she was nominated for Best of the Net 2017. Her artists’ books are in the Special Collections of the Cleveland Public Library, and in galleries in France, Mexico, and New Zealand, as well as in many private collections worldwide. She lives with her spouse and two cats in Chattanooga, Tennessee.