Repeat

by JOHN FREEMAN
I tell it so many times
on Tenth Street, over lunch
in a bar, to tender eyes,
it begins to sound
like a piece of news—

but once I decide
I’ll tell it how
it happened—
how she starved to death,
mumbled her pain,
clung, shat, moaned,
how I was too frightened
to sit with her
through the night
so she wouldn’t die alone.

[Purchase Issue 14 here.]
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and author and editor of several books, including How to Read a Novelist. Tales of Two Americas, an anthology on inequality in the U.S., and Maps, a collection of poems, will be published this fall.