for girls who will sit 
on the second floor bathroom
window ledge at kutztown high school.

i used to sit on the window ledge 
in the bathroom
between classes, in classes, &
when study hall got 
to feel too tight--
we lived in a make-shift ant farm--
busy twitch of antennas
& each of our six legs 
folded into ourselves--
there was a pervasive desire
to run though none of us knew where yet--

i had spaces like the library 
& the art room to exist between but
the window ledge was the only
place i think i truly
felt like i was comfortable--
a strip of territory
i choose to still call home--
i opened the window &
dangled my foot over the courtyard where
i watched grey and blue uniforms
go through the hourly performance
of gym class-- i want to
undress them & show them how
tender & freckled & scabbed everyone's
skin is beneath it all--
it was freeing
to know i had the option to jump--
i imagined myself in sudden free fall--
tumbling past the windows of the
trigonometry class-- the teacher 
might have the students measure 
angles & consult the Pythagoreans
to determine how far i fell--

another day in the thick 
heat of April-- i would
enter
to find the window wearing
a veil
of fog-- i would want to write
something profound & inspirational
but always find myself drawing 
hearts instead-- it was the only shape
my hands knew that they wanted--
heart after heart after
heart in a sort of Morris code
sent to the elementary school students
who sometimes noticed
my silhouette & single swaying Chuck Taylor
from their view at the adjacent playground--

i took pictures of myself with my cell phone
& sometimes i didn't even share them--
sometimes i kept them to myself
as a silent elegy to  a body
of a girl who spoke love into Morris
code-- broke her body like a host of
bread among boys who never 
believed she would jump-- 

from the ledge i could see 
the place where i had my first kiss
next to the blue bench between the slide
& the monkey bars where a red-headed boy
& i had held worm funerals
after it rained & got married
there
it was the first grade so
i still think it counts--
on the other side of the school
yard the trail krept up the spine
of saucany creak where another
boy used my body as his monkey bars--
undressed me & told me i liked it--
you learn a lot about yourself
when someone tells you what
they want you to be
& you perform it-- i listened
because i thought maybe
love was supposed to make
girls feel small & want to crawl
out second story windows--

i never told anyone back then i was
raped next to the playground
or that i liked to sit & survey
the spot from the bathroom window
between classes--
i didn't even call it rape--
if anything
i called it a gap-- an open
mouth where the words dropped
out into the court yard--

some days i put on a gym uniform 
& became an ant-- crawled in & out
of each room as a mechanism--
other days i wrote
poetry on sticky notes
from the bathroom window-- 
tossed them out the window
for no one & everyone 
to find--