I gave myself a challenge the other day to write a poem called

“Boys”
with the epigraph

“Sometimes a girl just needs one.” —Britney Spears

and tonight, I did it.

I did a backwards ghazal where each first line of the couplet ends with the word “boy” and all the other second lines rhyme with one other second line in the poem.

It’s a birthday poem.

It starts,

“You’re only as old as the boys
who’ll suck you off,” Kyle says and smacks me on the ass.