by Michele Bombardier

A single blue star in the white sky
of my thigh where I drove in the pencil,
its lead tip lodged like a bullet under my skin.
I don’t remember why, only how I hid
the angry red welt, how it raised up
like a slag heap. I was such a good girl.
Perfect, how my mother still describes me,
the word a crown of tungsten weight.
Daughter of a refugee, product of the projects,
her ticket out was the ring on her left hand.
How could she have known different?
I used to pinch the skin on my thigh and roll
the rice-sized cylinder between my fingers,
remind myself of that girl. It’s dissolved now,
nothing left to feel. Only a blue dot reminding me
to drive my pencil into the page, to be the bullet.

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Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Parabola, Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Pacific University in Poetry. She is a Hedgebrook fellow, the founder of Fishplate Poetry, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of her town.