She likes to hide in the alcove of her bedroom

and imagines herself as princess to be rescued

from a mundane town where she consistently thinks aloud

“I wish to hell I weren’t my mother’s child.”

She stares at herself in the mirror wearing her favorite dress.

The one she bought at the mall when she first developed breasts

Needle in your arm, blade in to your wrist:

too unoriginal to get you through this

wishing for things so unattained

as you can’t help but think

of all the lovers out there living your dream.

She takes a walk at three a.m. through her old block

where she once played classic sidewalk games like jacks and hopscotch,

back when things made sense cause they didn’t mean anything then

and she thinks how quickly the world made her a woman.

She wipes off her make-up, tears off her pearls so she won’t be mistaken for other girls.

The sweetest revenge on life is for her to conform to other girls.

She stands up from a concrete curb

and counts a star with a name she remembers

and laughs at a poem called “Jane Misanthrope,”

she wrote with an existential undertone,

cause the carvings found in her journal

are the greatest forgeries in the world.

These thoughts aren’t her, there’s too much to be missed

by the only girl I’ve seen love life like this.

She likes to write in the attic where she used to draw.

A dim-lighted room is her only escape to feeling above it all.

She writes “All I have to do is wait ‘till I’m in some odd, far-off place,”

where she write postcards she’ll never send

as she smiles for people she’ll never see again.

Spring forward fall back then.

She’ll never wish again.