Poetry by Monique Quintana

12 Sep 2016

“we smile at the scissor slits in our face.”

red

The white girl with the locker across from me
always asked to wear my lipstick—
It was the color of my menses,
the thing I had for just one year. She had hair stick-strait hair the color of sand and mine
was a dark tumbleweed with unintentional bangs, like Bettie Paige. I hand her the lipstick in
her warm white fingers and she hands it back, like we are passing a prayer, and we both
smack in the mirror, amid the slamming of lockers— we smile at the scissor slits in our face.
Why is it that when we say blood red, we think of bright red like a fairy tale? The red lipstick
we wanted was 1995, and we both knew then that blood red is really a dark brown, the
cesspool—our very bodies rejecting themselves.

Gender, Monique Quintana, Poetry, Race

Monique Quintana

Monique Quintana holds an MFA in Creative Writing Fiction from CSU Fresno, where she was the president of the Chicanx Writers and Artists Association. She is a Squaw Valley Writers Fellow and was the Senior Associate Fiction Editor of The Normal School literary magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Huizache, Bordersenses, Lunch Ticket, Ragazine, Madcap Review, WOLVES, Intrinsick, and Heather Press, among others. She is mother to a fourteen-year old chipster son and is the editor-in-chief of the blogazine Razorhouse Magazine.