Remembering the Girl
Jennifer Perrine
I remember you,
your limbs tan and toned
pulling up the sod,
piling the earth into your arms.
Your hands caressed vegetable and vine,
clung to clods of dirt and worms
as though they were sustenance,
as though they were breath.
I remembered you
in that pulsing summer light
on the night I caught you,
one hand fisted, white,
clutching tightly to the toilet seat,
the other shoving your toothbrush
against the softness of your throat.
I remembered,
even while I watched your bones
trying to crawl out of your flesh,
the flesh you sliced open with a kitchen knife,
red beads welling up on your forearms.
You said you needed proof
that you carried anything
so brilliant and vital.
You wore those scabs and scars
like a compass,
lines to locate a pain you could not name.
Tonight I stared for hours
at the place where the sun
took an ochre brush to those lines.
I measured the spaces
where your skin stretched
full and content.
I remembered you,
radiant, clothed in dirt
and clumps of grass,
before I learned what it meant to bleed,
before I knew what it was to starve.
