The Indicator x The Student: “where we learn to love and hate and cry”

You have tainted every sacred space

You — who held me holy in my love and rage

Kissed my balm-blistered palms

And wiped milk from my lips

You — who built fantasies in the canopies

Nailing board on branch as I gawked from below

Nestled in the goldenrods, prancing on pine dust

I was young and you knew

Gentle when I reached for the dirt in your hair

My sap-sticky hands smudging circles on your scalp

when you couldn’t scrub it out

I lathered honey through your hair

Leaning headlong into a sink

Whose drain consumed your curls

Giddy to steal your sweetness

Over broken bathroom tiles

As you worshipped a forest that spat you out like stale gum

And I tried to stay peaceful

Weaving myself in — to your cotton long-sleeves

(the muddy-colored ones that smell of weed and gasoline)

But your collar caged my throat

As you tugged me up those ragged trails o’ Katahdin

Teasing Wolfe’s Neck from my eyes

I forgave you one pebble at a time

For crashing my car

For cutting my hair

And smashing my piggy bank

(it doesn’t matter anymore

none of it matters anymore)

Because as Winter holds us in her flaking palms

You dare to tell me that my life is wrong and your life is right

in your righteous hypocrisy

I counted on you like I count the cracks in my ceiling

There every night, like the stars in my sky

You’ve caught me thinking of home

Where we learn to love and hate and cry

Where you rustled above me in the top bunk

Its frame holding us like a bowl of peeled and sectioned oranges

Mom’s hummy-humming floating from the living room

Squeezing under our door

Wrapping us like dumplings in our worn wrinkled sheets

Are you still awake?

Do you still forgive me for kicking you under the dinner table?

For scratching your CDs and swinging my fishing hook into your arm?

Please don’t tell Mom, please?

Every day I wish to tell her what I fear you will tell her first

But instead I whisper into the pine groves

Remember that Maine has always been

Yours before mine

His before hers

So I pray as you break my heart

That you may find a sister among the spruce

A confidant in the conifers

A love between the lies

Editor's note, September 25, 2025: The blurb was updated to best reflect the meaning of the poem.