A girl I once knew wrote a poem about a girl who begged for food on her hands and knees. Who begged to be fed, mouth open, teeth chipped. In the poem, the girl stands, finds that crushed glass had pressed webbed mosaics into the soft of her kneecaps. She kneels again. She gets fed. She does not feel full. The girl I knew tells me about the girl from the poem, the girl who swallowed sentences in teaspoons, the girl who whispered metered incantations to the sores on her feet, the girl whose white tears turned to spoiled milk behind her hazel dinner plates. But I knew my friend was the girl she wrote about, asking me to read her poem, to which I commented, This needs work, and her eyes narrowed, face dropped. She thought I’d be the one to feed her. xxx The first time I speak to the girl from the poem, I ask her to stand up. I pat the crown of her head. Her crown made of crooked sentences. My fingers leave smoketrails in her straw- berry hair. I watch blood stitch a trail on the concrete outside the thin arm of the gray church where we meet. Where she asks me for help, where she tells me she can’t stay sober. The raspberry lines look like a crooked outline of a girl I could never reassure. Though maybe I didn’t try hard enough. xxx The girl from the poem meets me in a coffee shop. Caramel pinpricks pock her parchment skin. She shows me a short story she wrote about a girl sniffing cocaine in a coffee shop bathroom. The girl from the poem excuses herself to the bathroom. When they come back, I teach them both the meaning of show versus tell. xxx The girl from the poem stands in front of a congregation, tells her story in a single sentence, says, Words are how I worship god. Syllables were her church and vowels her choir and consonants her bony pews. She reads her one-sentence story out loud to the congregation and the people whisper and the people sneer and the people laugh and I watch, hungry. I wonder if her sentence has a period. xxx The only thing more cliche than writing a poem about a poem is writing a poem about regret. xxx We sit in her car, frozen in front of my building and she tells me she’s afraid no one will ever love her. I admit the same. Maybe in that moment she knows I have nothing to offer but words. I hum into a crawling sun captured in fog as gray paints her windshield. After this night, we pretend we don’t know that I could never help. xxx Someone asks what the real story is here and I say: this is a poem about a girl who asked for a help I didn’t possess but offered anyway and she shared a poem so I would know her and I wrapped myself in a story because it was easier. xxx The girl from the poem calls, crying, tells me she wants to take her life. When I offer to take her to the hospital, she screams at me. She hangs up. This is the last time I hear her static voice crack through my phone. When she calls again, I’m too bruised to answer. xxx These sentences have periods because stories need fabricated timelines, false endings. Every time I think of her I revise my story, which is to say I hide. xxx The last time I see the girl from the poem is at a party, music indecipherable, like radio static. I tell her I got accepted into a writing program, that I move this fall. I’m jealous, she says. Her eyes bow to an earthy brown, water tracing her lids like em dashes, an aside. The worn bull’s eyes on her kneecaps healed. I’m jealous, she repeats. Show, don’t tell, I think. She tells me she stopped writing, she’s happier now. I see her staring at me as I close the front door, music dulling behind me. The half- mirrored effect of the broad bay windows makes her eyes an ellipsis.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
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