We Were Young Girls Once by Mahailey Oliver (Texas, 26)

We were young girls once,
posing for selfies crammed
in the bathroom of the ag barn,
tight t-shirts and low-waisted
jeans that screamed Skipped Lunch
but also We’re Too Bible Belt to Speak of Such Things,
fodder for fickle fellas to philander
while we prayed to the gods of Tiger
Beat Magazine to reveal Which Jonas Brother
We Were Most Likely to Marry. I spent
hours scrutinizing the finished products
when they were posted on Facebook--
every time noting how many likes
my friend got as the main poster--

pondering how I could be 5’6
to MK’s 5’3, yet “fat” by her standards
because I had reached 110
in our 8 th grade year and she was still
in double-digits. We were young girls once
and in that ag class we sat round-robin
with our crushes, who discreetly asked each
of us in turn if we had gotten our periods
yet by asking, “Are you a butterfly, or a caterpillar?”
Those of us that were butterflies
got wriggled eyebrows and winks,
more scandalous flirtations than the caterpillars
who had no idea what their inuendo meant.
We were young girls once, panicking over thigh gaps
and side parts, over algebra and Romeo & Juliet,
over the guy who kept serial-dating his way around
our friend group because it was a small town
with few choices. But man, did we think he could be our Joe,
our Nick, our Kevin. We were young girls once
who primped, preened, tweezed, schemed
our way into believing that we were somehow not enough
and maybe that’s where it all started for me—eighth grade.
The year before high school, when some of us young
girls started to figure “it” out, and others didn’t. We were
young girls with the expectations of grown women
on our shoulders, butterflies with wings to either
waft us up or weigh us down, though we lacked
the development to self-reflect. We were just young
girls, young impressionable girls;
nothing more, nothing less.





Mahailey Oliver is a graduate student of English and Advanced Pedagogy at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. Her poetry has previously appeared with Wingless Dreamer, Amarillo Bay, and HUMID12.