Dinky Bossetti Wants to Make You Really Uncomfortable

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael reminds us that poetry, erotic or otherwise, is one of the horniest, most honest ways to communicate.

You’re reading a guest post on PopPoetry by Alicia Thompson. Alicia is the national bestselling author of Love in the Time of Serial Killers, a romcom from Berkley Romance about whether one woman’s true crime obsession will keep her from true love. She also writes a biweekly newsletter about songs she listens to over and over and general observations about reading, writing, and life at aliciabooks.substack.com. 

---

Winona Ryder stars in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990) (Mubi)

If you wanted to know everything about Teenage Me, you could open one of my many composition books from that time covered in a collage of punk imagery and filled with frantic, looping script. Or you could just watch Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990), a coming-of-age film starring Winona Ryder as Dinky Bossetti, a weird, vulnerable misfit looking for where she belongs in Clyde, Ohio.  

Dinky was inspirational for me in high school. She dresses in sloppy layers of mismatched black over unlaced combat boots, she doesn’t brush her hair, and she always has a sardonic one-liner to put people in their place. Often, she doesn’t even need words, like at the start of the movie, for example.

Dinky shows up late to a town assembly to plan celebrations commemorating the return of the titular Roxy Carmichael, who gained notoriety in the town for inspiring a pop song 15 years before. Or really, for burning bright and then hauling ass, never to be seen again. 

Dinky keeps her head down, but she’s not exactly subtle as she crashes through the doors of the assembly halls and finds herself a seat. Down the row are two guys: her age, fresh-faced, All-American. You can tell they’d help an old woman to her car and call her ma’am but also know which convenience store would sell them beer on a Friday night. One is Gerald (Thomas Wilson Brown), a popular prep with flowing blond hair, who would come across as totally smarmy if not for the slight whiff of dork about him.

He leans forward when he sees Dinky. “Jesus, Dinky, do something with yourself,” he says. His obnoxious friend laughs. 

But Dinky just slowly leans forward herself, leveling Gerald with a stare. It’s the kind of stare meant to make him uncomfortable, and it works. All he can manage is a weak, “What are you looking at?” before Dinky rolls her eyes and leaves to sit in another row. 

This ten-second interaction is the first round of the back-and-forth dance Gerald and Dinky will do around each other throughout the movie. This round goes to Dinky, obviously. He tried to neg her, even if it came from a place of noticing her when no one else does, of seeing something he wished she’d see in herself. She’s not going to let him get away with it, lets him know she can cut him down without even expending any energy on words. 

But then, later, there’s her poem, showing what she can do with words when she wants to.

Dinky, Gerald, and a room full of their classmates are slouched in their chairs while their English teacher announces that there are four more students who have to recite their “original poems,” including Dinky. But first, a clean-cut extra from Saved by the Bell gets the chance to recite his, reading woodenly from a sheet of paper, his voice creaking. 

a cow
knows not what its tail is worth
until it’s lost it
and says ow

(All line breaks, capitalization and punctuation choices are mine, since we only know this poem through the oral tradition. Kind of a fun exercise to see how you might write it out, huh?)

It’s the perfect poem to set the scene, exactly what we expect out of a teenager for a class assignment. Short, simple, a little silly. So much so that it almost seems deep, if you think about it long enough, until you wonder if you could have a red wheelbarrow situation on your hands. But no. A cow saying ow: clearly that’s meant to be silly.

Then it’s Dinky’s turn. She rises from her desk, all unkempt hair, jangling dog tags, and intense eye contact. 

From a deep immaculate kiss 
She spread her two ripe, dripping limbs
And then I happened—

Cut to Gerald, sitting a few rows ahead of Dinky. He looks as stunned as if she had just walked over and put her hand right on his thigh. He glances around the room, then down.

The teacher pauses in the act of polishing her glasses at Dinky’s salacious opening gambit. “I beg your pardon?” 

But Dinky continues, starting to make her way up the aisle toward Gerald’s desk.

And the moon throbbed and fought with an angry sun
All that day and all that night
Until it forced me out

Gerald doesn’t know what to do. He’s trapped in his seat, and she’s crowding him. He takes off his glasses, an oddly vulnerable gesture. Is he shielding himself, not wanting to see her too clearly? Or is he unconsciously removing a barrier between them?

The teacher, meanwhile, is trying to get Dinky’s attention. She says her name sharply, once. A warning.

Dinky is standing next to Gerald’s desk now. She doesn’t need to read her poem off a paper—she has it memorized. And she’s making no secret of the fact that she’s directing it right at Gerald.

Now I scald here, alone
Touch me
With your white words and your dead hands

Gerald doesn’t know where to look. He’s practically vibrating with tension, caught up in Dinky’s performance and desperately wanting to escape at the same time. The teacher says Dinky’s name again, even more forcefully than before, trying to get her to stop.

Now before I freeze—

“That’ll be enough!” the teacher yells.

And become one of you

“Dinky!” 

The teacher slaps another student’s desk, and finally the message seems to get through. Dinky glances up, visibly frustrated. “You interrupted me,” she says.

Dinky hovers over Gerald’s desk, irritated at having been interrupted in the middle of her impassioned poem. Gerald is wearing a blue striped shirt with an enormous collar and physically shrinking down in his chair from the onslaught of Dinky’s poetry. Seriously, why is everyone in his row wearing chunky stripes? Were seating charts arranged by shirt pattern in the early ’90s? (FilmAffinity)

Wikipedia described the scene like this: “Dinky enjoys thumbing her nose at her peers and embarrasses Gerald, a cute popular boy, by reading a condescending love poem to him in class.” I was surprised by that description and thought about it afterward for a long time. It’s not inaccurate… it’s just not what I took away from the scene. 

Let’s take the “condescending” read at face value for a second. Dinky does like thumbing her nose at her peers. When she’s talking to the guidance counselor about the poem fiasco and other incidents, she mentions all the ways that her classmates have shut her out over the years. Later, she also reveals the way her adoptive mother seemed disappointed when she was more into books than dolls and boots than ballet slippers. A whiff of “not like the other girls” is definitely strong around Dinky Bossetti, and she carries herself in such a way as to never let you forget it.

There was also that first kid’s poem, the one about the cow. It sets up such a contrast to Dinky’s that, by comparison, her poem seems razor sharp. Hers is longer, but she didn’t need to read it from a paper. She not only recited it, she performed it. It has some fairly vivid imagery, interesting word choice. Now I scald here. What work is that word scald doing on us?

And then, of course, there’s the last line. And become one of you. Delivered the way it is, directly at Gerald, practically in his ear, it’s not hard to read that as a message that she is better than him, that she doesn’t want to be like him and the other popular kids who make her life hell. Jesus, Dinky, do something with yourself. Go fuck yourself, Gerald. 

After the Poem Incident, Dinky runs into Gerald in a shop. Her hair is brushed, she’s feeling buoyant and hopeful after the song inspired by Roxy Carmichael started to play on the radio, and she wants to apologize to Gerald. (Forgotten Films)

But Dinky’s poem is not condescending so much as challenging. She wants Gerald to be different. She wants him to meet her where she is. The purpose of her poem is to provoke, and it certainly works. 

It’s also a vulnerable poem. Touch me, she says directly. The command is made to the very same person with the dead words and white hands, the person she doesn’t want to become. Touch me. 

I remember being a teenager. Sometimes creative writing was the only way I could say something I needed to. Sometimes it was the way to say something I didn’t even know I felt. And even if there was that you-laugh-because-I’m-different-but-I-laugh-because-you’re-all-the-same patina over everything I wrote, it didn’t change the fact that I was writing to reveal something about myself. 

I mean, look at this folder from my sophomore year poetry project:

My folder from my sophomore year poetry project (Alicia Thompson)

The first poem includes lines like, “Inside my eyes mirror the gray sky—vacant pools that reflect nothing back,” and the kicker “But as I sink down to my knees, I feel only indifference.” Sad! my teacher wrote in the margin.

The ethos I hoped to present was clear: I didn’t care. Nothing touched me. But you can tell lies in poetry at any age, and in high school that was definitely one of my biggest ones. I cared so much, about everything. 

And that’s why I don’t fully buy that Dinky’s poem was condescending. That’s the lie. Meanwhile, Dinky is so filled with want, ready to reach out to Gerald and see if he’ll reach back.

Poetry always tells the truth, too.