I will never forget the first day of freshman English,

when my teacher mentioned she was vegetarian

and a pimpled boy in an orange-billed Giants cap asked why

in the way only teenagers do—ingenuine and genuine

at the same time—and the teacher paused, considering,

on the brink of some cliff I couldn’t see, before she explained,

matter-of-factly, under the pulsating fluorescent lights,

how her older brother’s friend raped her when she was

our age, and the next day, as she watched her mother

prepare a chicken for dinner, she felt exactly like the dead

bird—fridge cold and raw—and as her mother

separated thigh from breast, our teacher decided

she would never eat meat again. As you might expect,

a roomful of fourteen-year-olds did not know how

to respond, could only open and close their mouths like goldfish

in fishbowls, the kind who seem to only float.

Our teacher calmy moved on, discussing the year’s

required reading—Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter—

but I was too absorbed with all she’d said and carried

which seemed suspended in the air, as if it were dust—

impossible to see until it settles on a hard surface—

and for the first time I understood the past

and present to be impossibly bound, interlocking

links of a thin chain we each wear around our necks.

When the bell rang, my classmates may have returned

to the same world they’d known, but the world I entered

through the standard corridor was irrevocably altered,

sharpened and equally blurred, just as it was

last night, when we were all bound to the radio,

listening to the testimony we knew too well.

I was preparing dinner, my hands busy pulling out

the chicken’s packaged neck and giblets—

wrapped carefully in plastic, then tucked back

into the cavity where her small bird heart once beat—

and I couldn’t stop remembering the boys’ laughter,

all the times we’ve been a meal for someone’s awful hunger.