there is much more space on a page than obvious
she & i would discover,
on the shared corner of a desk,
backside of ms. p-blank’s classroom.
who was young & pretty
as b-trunk girls i’d sneak of glimpses of at home.

competing, we’d squeeze row after row of sentences between each line,
‘til the words needed a microscope.
script only we could decipher,
as were the rules.

rules which remained unbroken for years.

her shirts smelled of lavender,
grapes ever tangled in her hair.
& she was chewing her lip dead already,
which would come to mean all sorts of things.

day after day we’d meet dawn on a stretch of concrete
whizzing by below the long belly of our luck.

‘til suddenly the sun had beaten us to the road
three months in a row.

‘til suddenly she woke & walked to class
while i ignored mine
plenty pavement away.

‘til suddenly she was made the spot of her lip,
still as the road itself,
laid to a rest she’d never wake from.

but many years removed from the days of ms. p-blank’s classroom
where we pressed words into impossible places.