Hunting for a notebook to fill with dreams
and frivolous stories, I found instead a journal.
No blank canvas here for a girl's daydreams,
but familiar letters. Slanting, angled, bait
I tasted eagerly, a curious thief. "I am tired."

That afternoon the sky burned with blue,
offering safe paths to forgetting, but I
stayed inside to read. "I am tired,"
the slanting letters whispered. "I worry
that time shoulders past like strangers
on the subway. It knows I will never do

"What I could have done, but instead
I chose—"
A girl's hands can move in panic, to snap
a journal shut, but no speed can let eyes
un-see a damning confession. I sprinted
outside and stared at the unchaged sun

Until my eyes burned with the tears
I couldn't conjure. That night my mother
called us to dinner. I saw her calloused
hands, her back as straight as the pride
with which she smiled at my chatting brother.
When had her face grown lines?

I trembled then at her choice, and at
the consequences, the blood flowing
beneath my skin. How could a life given
ever be worth lives grown, be equal to
us parasites feeding, unquestioning,
devouring the crop before it grew?