Hardware

Men never asked how old I was.
Instead, they wanted to know how
young I was, and whether it was enough.

Of course, I didn’t know that then,
and why would I? The product was
attention and it was free. The origins

and their ethics did not concern me.
I was there for dinner and opportunity,
neither of which ever made it onto the plate.

I was a teenager, and the city could have
buried me with the right gust of wind.
Now, I sit with students the same age I was

and call them what they are: kids.
The legal age for buying cigarettes is now
twenty-one but it wasn’t then. The question is

what does a forty-year old have in common
with an eighteen-year-old, and the answer is
nothing. The question is not a why, but how.

How do they learn our secrets and sell
them back to us? Young girls speak in a
dialect old men swear they understand.

It’s a language their daughters are in
the process of learning. I never got asked
for my ID at the bar until I was twenty-five

and then it was every time after

Danielle (she/her) is a professor of disability rhetoric and creative writing. A finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Non-fiction and nominee for The Pushcart Prize in Creative Non-Fiction and Best of the Net 2022, her work has appeared in Driftwood Press, The Florida Review, The New Orleans Review and others. @danielleshorr