You’re sitting in the back of a squad car at midnight
and you know the window is closed
because everything on the other side is distorted
by a film of dried spit, which likely came from the last guy in your place
who couldn’t use his hands to fight, so he spat at the window
and it was another thing gone wrong for him, but you envy him
anyway, because he isn’t you, locked here—guilty and ashamed—
because you let her lead the way on the bridge
you didn’t know was broken, which is what you told the cop
who is returning to the car, his boots grinding the gravel like breaking bones
and he wants to chuck some stones at you because you’re a guy
and he found your bag of pot and girls are afraid of railroad bridges
at night—everyone knows that—so he says you must have pushed, lured
dragged, raped the girl, must have been jealous, obsessed, high,
aroused, overcome enough to hurl her from the bridge
in your rage, so now you start to sob, shaking and hot,
snot running into your mouth, armpits stinking, tears stinging
the welt she raised on your face earlier when you were teaching
her how to stick fight in the graveyard
and that’s why you love her, oh god
because she’s twenty and her sweat smells like broken green branches
and river sand, but you cough out to the cop that she is your best friend
and that you would never, ever hurt her and please oh please
say she landed in the water and swam to shore
safely. Later,
sitting in a locked room, still hoping,
having been stripped, fingerprinted and photographed, your face scrutinized,
you see a different man approaching through the smudged wire and glass
of the door—a weary and narrow man—scowling under his thick, gray
brow. They’re not going to bring you a chaplain or a tender, pink-faced
rookie, or even your mother, who you think you hear yelling at someone
outside; they give you this man, who tells you she’s dead
while he straddles a chair to stare at you
and you know;
you grip your head and know,
every one of them—except maybe your mother—is thinking,
it should have been him.
