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Watching

MEGAN ERICKSON

This is a true story. And also, not. The inspiration was the feeling of shame I had (in retrospect) for having been embarrassed about sharing the same name as a girl in my class as a kid. That became a poem about class. Some lines are fact, some fiction.

When I was a child I made a girl cry, relentlessly

as a deer tongue running over a salt lick. What happened to her?

I could have been her friend. I was embarrassed, then,

that we shared the same name.

We knew she shit in an outhouse, wore a marine’s coat,

and ate meat she’d helped to skin, spreading the raw

illicit smell like it was perfume. I heard once

she brought a hammer to school.

She used it to open a battery. Smashed.

She could do it to your face if she was in a rage,

like that. Like you were a science project.

Why do they call it grace when most days, most of us are saved

by things like, our parents coming home in shoes?

When those boys dropped a quarter on the floor just to see

would she run after it, and everyone—and I—waited, watching

we knew that she’d need it.