Have you ever read a poem
that rang so true
it punched you in the gut
and twisted the knife too?
 
Bosselaar did this to me once.
Her poem which I read off a pixelated screen
cracked me into two
unraveled my intestine
until it was a single string,
it was the tightrope I walked,
until the imagery of the poem
left me dangling in the air with my two bare hands,
and even when my arms grew weak,
I didn’t feel fear of death
because finally this poem
had spoken for me a truth
I’d never realized
was hiding just beneath my skin.
Or maybe I had buried it there and burned it from my memory,
but even as I faced the horrors of this poem
as it wrote me inside out,
I wanted nothing more than to drag myself toward it,
take two of its lines in my hands,
spread them apart, and drag myself into the spot between the lines of the poem
so I could feel
a way I’d never felt before.