I should not have anything to say.
These people you call friends
were once mine too.
 
14 and 18— we were children,
and I can tell myself that you knew
no better. You loved an idea of me
while only being an idea of yourself.
 
And now you post pictures 
with old friends I once loved
more than myself. You beam with pride
like your pride never harmed anyone,
like you never hounded the girl I loved
for details about me that you had no right
to know, like you never trembled at the sight
of my father in a parking lot with a gun.
 
You are new now. You are bright 
and shiny, unblemished by a past that never
happened. You are a forgotten, dead name,
and I’m a poet still writing about high school.
I should not have this much to say.
 
Enough years have passed that you have
become a nothing but a story—but when
I warn my sister of the evils in this world,
she is still too young to understand
how I remember your face, though I looked
away; the day before Valentine’s, a pink carnation
and a confession from someone I once
considered a friend. And your face,
the expression you made,
 
something new now.