Loneliness is stuck like a pencil in the belly of the sharpener. Its shaven head is lead and its tip stabs the skin of paper stretched across the girl’s face open to her notebook of poems.
Where are the gold mines, I want to ask and she turns the page, indicating the rust stains of the words she parks, line by line, in the parking lot of the sunset, the tear and the arm torn from the shoulder of the boy who once embraced her.
I’ve bought, I want to say, earrings
and a gun to pierce ears,
and meanwhile, beneath her brow
her gaze is tortured
by the inquisition of the eyes.