You cannot tell me you don’t know it      because you were there too, right     from the beginning from before when there was     nothing     so don’t come saying you won’t remember     how they put Jesus’s name in the sky and spread fire     baking     black     pavement all on the ground: killing the trees and broke the   ladybugs aphids and eyes in the grass    tore a page of a page and put us in the library for      nothing      don’t say you 

forgot     the teacher who taught only about     birth and sex     sex and birth     called a uterus a sack of 

nothing     or the one who wouldn’t say     intertextual     because it’s a dirty word     and the fields and    strawberries where they buried our pride     and we went looking     and had to come back with     nothing 

don’t tell me you didn’t have to hide     behind the chairs and lie against a cold     and muddy floor     while she prayed over us because we thought     it was one of those kids with guns but it just turned out     to be     nothing don’t say you forgot     how you dropped     me let me bleed out     before I could even reach     the door    just like Winston Smith, life seeping out my eyes     and leaking onto the walls     when you looked right through me, because for you all of it was     nothing     at all.