The Voyeur by E. Marie Gray

“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.”

—Margaret Atwood

From the mirror on her wall, between her tacked-up movie posters, my glass eyes watch her tie her shoes.

I can tell when she remembers I’m up here. It’s when her posture ugly-ducklings, swan from vulture;

each vertebra files into a more alluring line,
the way they must when men are near. Other times,

she sinks into her book like it’s the chair she occupies cross-legged, hunched, fingers tugging a lip. I see

teeth last touched by the man who plied her braces off and shiver in my window-intimacy.

I think I am forgotten until she rises, comes
to me and watches back. She starts to lift my shirt

and I hope she will undress me tenderly,
but she’s only examining my waist.