The Girl Who Couldn't Wait
by Theresa Boyar

The girl who taught me
how to preheat a griddle
in the trailer park
isn't in the trailer park
anymore.

We were twelve.
She slipped red fingers
through tap water and snapped
over the silent pan.
Not yet.

Neither of us could guess
five years would alter so much,
that batter left alone to rise
would harden if abandoned
indefinitely.

Two years ago, we knew she was bruised
in Miami, plump from detox with a pigtailed
daughter in tow. The scars along her
arms still ridged and
pinkish raw.

Today she's nowhere.
Friends trace fingers over yearbook shots,
seeing bits of themselves
in the grayscale stare -- a girl turned
inside out,

seams alive with energy. Not the
girl who snapped her fingers
in the kitchen of a weed-wrought trailer,
smiled at the quick hiss,
and said, easily, patiently,
Now.

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