Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

(from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) 

Because We Were Girls Together

(a golden shovel) 

I think we both know that I have not known loveliness like you have 

and this is a sharp comfort to me, because I am comforted by what is known. 

Lucky children, we were. Round like eggs, ruddy we were and knew the solidness of the 

jointed hip. Hands led us firmly into insect evenings,

salted mornings, 

wet-paint afternoons.

Quietly and carefully I 

whisper to you the sum totals — all that I have 

unconstrained by days. Nothing measured,

nothing, measured. I was sticky like a child, like flypaper, straining for everything out 

of our joint mangled grasp. My 

body nestled comfortably in your tissue paper life:

co-conspirators, flicking away traces of the outside world with 

restless fingers. My tongue was made for bitterness; anger, resentment, coffee. 

You have always been sweet. I devour, and you learned to measure your meals in spoons. 

You laugh with painted eyes. You sing. I 

bite. Or else I am worse, that is to say, quiet. Now I take stock of what you just don’t know 

and speak about it to no one. In corners I marvel at the

violence of growing, the reedy / sleepy sloping of our voices, 

the fussing / dy(e)ing

of our hair. You ripened with

a poise no one gave to you, left me with a 

feeling of the slow, velvet dying

of the leaves in fall

waiting dutifully for the dull pain that comes with being beneath. 

Whining: why was I denied the 

spring? You always refuse to sing with me, any music

was yours from a very young age, from.

And listen I know you don’t like opening up to people and we haven’t talked but I had a 

terrible thought today about how we are weeks of brackish words, hours of phone calls farther

than we have ever been. And I was thinking of sulky holidays, sharing an aching room

and in unsubtle sleep we curve and hold each other so 

close, almost exactly like how 

we did as round girls. So please tell me what I should 

do with that. How do I talk to you how often should I 

call should I call? I don’t want to presume