I had a friend once,
when I was smaller.
And though it has been
what someone even as young as I may call years,
I can still remember
her blonde hair,
blanched under the light of the sun,
a wide gap set between two front teeth and those
big round eyes that children have,
which, when closed resembled fat spiders
crawling around a web of
thin blue-green thread.

More than that, I will
always remember the look of her
when she told me her father beat her.
Beats her.
And she tried, profusely tried to express the seriousness
of her situation (something I can only
just begin to grasp the difficulty of) and I did nothing
but sit on a bar, with
my feet in front of me on another.

And know that my mind has
slightly matured, I tend to think
about her, about
what he may have done to her.

I think about her house,
what it could have looked like.
And that description is not one of glamour.