For the First Time at 39, I Paint My Nails

Waiting for the pharmacist to fill another
month’s worth of meds, I am on my knees
at the end of the cosmetics aisle, reading the names
off the nail polish bottles: Midnight Cowboy,
Little Black Dress, Dirty Baby. Some people,
when faced with the impending doom
of another decade, go bungee jumping. Some elect
to leave their life partners. Others wonder if
they’re more of a Liquid Leather than a Black Raven
kind of girl. But let’s be honest, these days I feel
like anything—literally anything—but a girl.
I begin with my nondominant hand,
applying the bottle of Noir, knocking out
each nail like a skeet-shooting carnival game
and I can’t miss. Hardly any mess, I recall
middle school friends expertly painting wild pigments
on each other’s fingers, egging me on to join them,
to bear their beauty rituals, to take my place
at their altar. I refused, afraid of what I’d be
capable of with a woman’s hands. But the ten tips
now complete, my fingers tingling and cold,
the solvent evaporates around me like a spell.
With a twist of the wrist, a move I’ve noticed
women make, I turn them over to see what I’ve done.
In the light, they are a scattering of black beetles.
They are night berries, rotten and wavering.
Spidering eyes, obsidian and ogling. They are
the keeled scales of a rat snake, ridged, raised.
A moving mercurial surface. A one-way mirror.
What a gift to give myself, now, at this life’s
halfway point: to be made other, fashioned into
foreign object, fit for my own consumption.