“It’s like punching someone in the face. If a girl punches a guy in the balls, she has to get hit in the face. It’s like, equal. That’s how fucking painful it is.”
How many conversations come back to this?
We are sitting in an empty parking lot. A steady line of cars goes by like seconds.
Four in a half circle, we are sitting, like a poker game without a table.
Squatting, looking at knees, then cars, knees then cars.

I think of the English paper I finished. I think of the points I brought up; weak, academic, no fear of being proven right or wrong. They are just emblems. I think of an essay I used
on Sylvia Plath’s poetry. ”it is like waking to discover one's adult self, grown to full height, crouched in some long-forgotten childhood hiding place, all the old rejected transparent beasts and monsters crawling out of the wallpaper.” I think of Sylvia Plath on movie posters and television screens, on t-shirts.

Everybody wants passion. We, instead, smoke cigarettes and talk about the police.
How many conversations come back to this?

She says she has four points on her license.
He says he’d kill for that, he has fourteen.
I see his tattoo, black, long lines like metal on his arm. There is a cross in the middle.
He smiles, never off, never on. I think of school pictures.
School pictures and report cards, and the refrigerators they sit on.

She says I’d like him. I look at his white undershirt, low jean shorts and sneakers. He talks about his motorcycle.

She drove me here, brought another one here, like knives and forks in a row.