No Longer A Girl

by Stephanie Brown

The city was a gray city.
I was dreaming of nothing then.
I had no hopes of love anymore.
My back was breaking.
My heart was cracked.
Though it wasn’t broken by another person.
I liked to shout, but there was no one to listen.
I was no longer a girl: no one looked and they once did.
It was dark but there were no storms to create verdant forests.
Drizzle, steady, on the train which ran down the freeway, then
went underground.
I remember those guys nodding out, that kid playing with
himself
All the way home from the airport. In the cute house I rented
There was this stain on the planked floor which trailed
directly from the bathroom to the around-the-corner
bedroom door.
Someone had walked that path, dripping wet, for years.
I wasn’t doing it, I swear.
It’s hard to believe, but there was a crematorium on the corner.
Really. And there was a graveyard where my street dead-ended.
I found the graves of the Civil War soldiers, marked by cannons.
There were ponds, bent trees, and leaves floating in the waters.
And if you walked to the top of the hill
You could see Merritt Lake downtown.
You could see the Pacific beyond.
You could see light shimmer on the water but everything
Inside of me held still.
Not afraid of the feel of the dead,
Not afraid of the living sitting in cafes or walking the dog:
On Sundays I’d walk down to the street near my house
Where there were stores and things to do, even a movie theater,
Because I thought: “I’ll take a walk and that will be fun”
But everything was sad, even the joy I once felt opening the big
Sunday newspaper was gone.
After a while I left that city, when I was done.

-from Allegory of the Supermarket (The Contemporary Poetry Series)

*Photo courtesy Jungle_Boy.