a night kitchen

Not enough leaves to catch
A shadow on the ice.

Sun rising on
the last snow of the winter

And then I will confess everything with a pencil in my hand and a scrap of cheap paper on the table in front of me. This is how you do it, the books tell me. Beg all the words out onto a page.

The cheap paper has thin blue lines on it to show me where to put the words. The mechanical pencil in my hand, almost forgotten, is chewed, even though Sister Michaella promised a real eraser to any girl who didn’t chew the end of her pencil shut.

I beg myself and the words come, sometimes. They come so slowly that I am not sure if they are mine or someone else’s, those of a brighter girl who had her hand up before mine.

And this writing of words that comes with thinking about what I have or have not done is peaceful, more peaceful than the day I lost myself all the way into the words and tapped the rhythms of them out onto my desk until the whole room watched.