All week I scan flimsy dollar store goods
and ride the bus benches home late at night
to a house that is all bent rum caps in ashtrays
and drone bleary-eyed through my school days
with everyone I don’t know looking on with quiet concern.
My skin is curdled, the ugly pallor of milk,
and the other girls giggle together
and chat on their cell phones and are all smooth
brown legs and no-socks in fashionable sneakers
while I am inexplicably in tears in the bath or break room
or jostled by every bump on the last bus home alone.
And I stopped one February night on the bridge
that goes over the highway and looked
at the distant skyline from the very edge of this massive city
and thought how much I’d love to flee its loneliness
and take a bus far away, because everyone can flee by bus,
even part-time dollar store cashiers,
and I could just forget all of them in an instant
and be gone for somewhere else. And I often think
on the wind in my face that freezing night
watching the cars beneath whip and shrink into oblivion,
and how perhaps one day I’d join them, and simply be gone.