How Could You?
You met a high school girl today.
She was sat on the beach, wasn’t she?
Her painted toes digging into the Earth like claws in a mattress, that’s what you thought of.
Her hair told stories the way old churches did.
It whipped wildly against her spine, spraying about stinging sand and bringing breath to the still dampened locks clinging to the back of her neck.
You saw her on that dive at sunset.
She surfaced infrequently, like a seedling, only to nurse a cigarette dangling from a friend’s palm resting on a nearby dock.
She knows more constellations than you,
You thought her lungs must have been like a scrapbook, taking air from memories like flower petals from different states, pressing them in books, exhaling them like new words
into the mouths of those who remembered how to read
You know she would let you fuck her brains out if you wanted to.
You saw books in her bag, littered with pins and woven keychains.
She surrendered to the wind and strangled her hair into a long braid; it was clear that she had taught herself to do so long ago. Her eyes could close.
She wrapped her narrow shoulders in a towel, she was architecture, myth.
Later you will ask her her name and forget it, tell her it reminds you of an author you’ve never read.
You’ll ask her for her thoughts on dog euthanasia,
what colleges she loves. You’ll reminisce on your days of lockers and lunch-lines– tell her how you are living proof that it gets better.
You are hope, she is loved here.
Don’t tell a soul.
Tell her she is loved here. Tomorrow night, she flies home.
She’ll be awake thinking of you then.
What a rush to think she forever will.
How could you.
