“What is wrong with her?” an outsider asks
The answer is:
Nothing outrageous, in a moral sense
She just has a brutal conversational style
That breaks a bunch of social rules
Most people rely on
She tells you the heist
The way someone tells you
Where they parked:
Left, then right, then “anyway,”
Then left again
You nod through extra facts
Victims learning manners, character, grit
Through rain, third cousins, the color of the van
Through the part that should be blood
But comes out beige
Why read the room when you can inhabit it?
Hoard your particulars there
Until your thoughts can’t move
Anxiety takes the long way
Around the point
Loneliness stretches a sentence
Into company
Maybe what’s wrong is the air
When she starts
That the story is hot, sputtering steam
From the broken radiator we’re tied to
Soft social rope one could chew through
But we agree not to
Out of fear she’ll catch us
And when she finally stops
You breathe, laughing, guilty, grateful
“What is wrong with her?”
A kind of rescue, too