The Möbius Strip Club of Grief

I still fantasize I can do something about it.

That girl in the outpatient-care facility for teenagers

confided to me that she sneaked out to see a guy

at his frat party, and he shared her with his three friends,

to have a taste after he was done. “Is it supposed

to hurt so much?” she whispered to me. ”I mean,

for this long after?” She was bulimic, and we both

hated our mothers. The next day I said, We should

tell someone. And she said, “I’ve talked it over

with my best friend. She says

I should be proud of it.” She was thirteen

and I, sixteen, recovering from those endless nights of shrieking

across the house, out into the yard and

into the cold moonlight to wish myself into some

other species; the endless silent Stooges’ bangs and thwacks,

some self-preservation up against inherited solitude;

bent almost in half, the copper piping of my family grief

that always raked itself across me

until I was deformed by it,

until I was defined by it—

but dammit,

I hope that girl’s doing well.

I hope she can keep down food

like parents in the stands at a game, even if those men still exist—

important men, I imagine. Men who now run conglomerates

and have well-to-do families. Or maybe men I see

every day at work. Or whose books I read.