Our Girls

Gaunt
figures
with bright
square clothes
over scrawled dark
pencil:
long faces,
thin lips, large eyes:
(one in the forehead,
the other,
exiled by my childish hand
to a perch on
the left cheekbone),
stare from their
two-dimensional vantage points
on recycled paper
at the graphite contours
of the women
in clean
pink dresses.
Chosen tendrils
escape from charming coifs
to hover around level eyes
and pouting lips.
The eyes look up at their creator:
child-artist with a riotous laugh,
a Crayola jutting from
curly blond hair,
while I,
a gaunt figure
in bright square clothes,
look on
with longing
to be a woman like this girl.