Spring Formal

poetry

The cigarette vending machine can tell
I’m not old enough. It scans my skin and bones,

calculates, refuses to vend. No machine
accepts my invitation to prom. Their default

screen flashes help yourself and I allow myself
the clunk of one orange Crush, each sip

he crushes me, he crushes me not—a small difference
like the one between getting stoned and stoning. Confusing verbs

like lay, lie, laid—getting and not doing is vending
machine sex logic. It’s April and it snows

all over the plum blossoms. Everywhere
girls put on jewelry and corsages.

Some of the blowsy red tulips
have black dusted throats.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series and was listed as new and notable book by The New York Times. She is also the author of June in Eden (Oregon State University Press). She has won the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, New England Review, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.