POETRY BY NOREEN OCAMPO

The Boys and I

The boys in my neighborhood crave violence today. 

They tangle their bikes and bruise each other’s 

shins with the tires. They laugh bright as metal 

as they swarm me, their fingers trilling their rusty bells. 

The boys shout for me the things they’ve learned 

to shout at women, and I recognize their bodies

as I slip between them, swallowed in my older 

brother’s clothes and my neck sweaty with his blue 

cologne. We are not so different, the boys and I. 

Here is their mistake: I have never been good 

at being a woman. I understand their hunger. 

Our small bodies are desperate to prove.

Noreen Ocampo is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her collection Not Flowers won the 2021 Variant Lit Microchap Contest, and her work can also be found in Sundog Lit, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Marías at Sampaguitas, among others. She holds a BA in English from Emory University and currently studies poetry in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. She enjoys transparent things, ice cream, and the little tags connected to most tea bags.