I knew a girl once I knew a girl once who glided into a black hole and as posited by Albert Einstein
slid beyond the event horizon the place of no return space-time collapsing
and that young girl from Latvia evanesced the matter that she was too much matter
for the small space that she occupied just a young girl from Latvia her family’s tree of life
budding over America flowering immigrant dreams in a sometimes-inhospitable land
a land in which even being blond and blue-eyed and smart could not save you from
derision if you lived on the wrong side of the river and our parents not wanting to talk about it
lectured us about the wrong thing lectured us about staying away from the frozen edges
the Merrimack River rushing through the center of our once-industrial town
powering the mills in which all new immigrants had been pressed into piecework
the city’s more established haves settling on one riverside new have-nots on the other
this Latvian family with means mistakenly choosing the wrong side as if any parents’
words or choices could keep any of us safe as if black holes were a thing outside of us
instead of the beast within our fourteen-year-old selves tortured monstrously
by otherness she had a deaf twin this young Latvian girl a sister we did not know
because in the mid-century there was no place in neighborhood schools for those who were
different and so Daryl would footslog along the river wind rattling the birches each day leaving
half of herself behind to sit in the row of wooden desks with a group of bullying strangers
the most slippery moment arriving with the Iowa Test she scored highest in the grade
which spotlighted her gave her the gift of more ridicule and rejection and so
is it any wonder that she chose the black hole the ice snapping under her feet
the wind scraping her face but I did wonder for decades she being the first
I knew to choose that black oblivion tumbling from my own pedestal I considered
my part in her choice had I been kind enough or kind at all could it have ended differently
how had we all missed those storm clouds gathering the cumulative force of gravity
overwhelming a place of eternal entanglement from which not even light could escape
