To My Younger Self

Abstract

To My Younger Self Alison Prine (bio) I know you less and less,but forgive your miscalculations, the distances you thought you'd travel,and your terrible, naive desire to be good. Time grows between uswith a mechanical agency. You would be shocked to hearI found a photograph in my desk of a girl your age who died by her own handusing a plastic bag, duct tape and a rope. From her I learned the inequalityof a question mark and a period. If you ask if I loved that girl,I would say, there is not enough science, no sharp enough serrations, nor lengthin all the highways to answer you. I threw that picture away. Two days laterI emptied my trash and saw her face staring up at me, stuck at the bottomof the empty basket. What we do not to be forgotten.It's back in my desk now. And I am saying this to youbecause she would want it. [End Page 418] Alison Prine alison prine's debut collection of poems, Steel, was a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Field, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She lives in Burlington, VT, where she works as a psychotherapist. Copyright © 2019 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.