Katherine's Coffeehouse

Dear Mrs. McGreevy, I am sorry I was a little scared of you when I knew you were alone, how afraid I was to kiss your cheek – you see, I could not bear the way that rude hair on your forgotten chin would puncture the innocence of my own, and I was so very much afraid that your mouth had resisted its own skin, taught against the gums,

Strange how dreams and poems work, how everything mixes together, and some of

Because you wore a t-shirt with a rainbow on it, and because your earrings looked like the ones I wore in college, oblong and shell and dangling to your lovely thin shoulders, and a smile that invited me in that first time we met, and because you talked to me about writing

Last night I dreamt of a girl, not just any girl, she was eleven and had long, black, pretty hair and an innocent pale face with a little nose and serious lips and a chin that had not seen as many meals as she needed and her mother didn’t want her anymore and her father had disappeared.

This is my love song to men. And men who identify as men. Not men who pose, snap pictures of you, then drop you in gutters to drown in waters they pour from the rooftop.

They called it The Baltimore Catechism— every doctrine has one, but this book had a special creed for teens: God, remind me to obey and do what I am told, remind me in order to be loved, that first, I must be lovable.

Once, there, I saw a soldier, leaning against a barren tree,

I am a poet. Of course I speak my truth.

Help me not be normal. Help me when I am in formidable first grade, counting my fingers under my desk because math is hard and there's too much talk from inside out and every last word barges into my brain the way you did my bedroom

i dreamt last night i hid in an elevator molding my back into angles and steel