The Liar
BY EMILY KAGAN TRENCHARD
After suicide counseling session number seven
in at least as many months, I began to realize
she didn’t want to be dead bad enough,
and I’d stand there, watching the butter knife
and bad intentions, and let her scrape her arms to shit.
I had spent the seventh grade in dutiful silence
buying home-pregnancy tests, stealing alcohol,
sneaking out to keep hold of this girl
and the naked damage she’d let me glimpse, lusting
for the moments that always came; finding her
in some small, unpleasant place. I, her savior.
But once I found out that she had shared her secret
with several other girls, I became thick with jealousy.
Joined with my jilted others in comparing versions
of the stories we’d been told, fingering the holes
and inconsistencies like dirty old men.
The day they called the entire eighth grade in to the auditorium
so the police could explain, you could hear the rough scrape
of stone against stone, as a thing so real ground into
the dirt of our imagined truth. It made our teeth ache.
Not for the arrest of our favorite teacher, or the sick
of his wandering hands, not even for the broken body of a liar
we despised as much as ourselves, but for what we knew
and did not do. This ugly child of silence still
so much alive, despite turning all our hands to smother it.
After suicide counseling session number seven
in at least as many months, I began to realize
she didn’t want to be dead bad enough,
and I’d stand there, watching the butter knife
and bad intentions, and let her scrape her arms to shit.
I had spent the seventh grade in dutiful silence
buying home-pregnancy tests, stealing alcohol,
sneaking out to keep hold of this girl
and the naked damage she’d let me glimpse, lusting
for the moments that always came; finding her
in some small, unpleasant place. I, her savior.
But once I found out that she had shared her secret
with several other girls, I became thick with jealousy.
Joined with my jilted others in comparing versions
of the stories we’d been told, fingering the holes
and inconsistencies like dirty old men.
The day they called the entire eighth grade in to the auditorium
so the police could explain, you could hear the rough scrape
of stone against stone, as a thing so real ground into
the dirt of our imagined truth. It made our teeth ache.
Not for the arrest of our favorite teacher, or the sick
of his wandering hands, not even for the broken body of a liar
we despised as much as ourselves, but for what we knew
and did not do. This ugly child of silence still
so much alive, despite turning all our hands to smother it.
Emily Kagan Trenchard began writing poetry while at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work was commissioned for an address to the graduating class of 2004. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Ragazine, Get Underground, The Shiny Gun, The Nervous Breakdown, and Word Riot. She also received an honorable mention in Rattle’s 2009 Poetry Prize. Emily has been a featured writer and performer at numerous reading series and universities across the country, and was a part of Def Poetry Jam’s seasons 3 and 4. Though poetry is a large part of her creative life, she has a Master’s degree in Science Writing from MIT and makes her living in multi-media science communications, helping the public become fascinated by everything from cholesterol to cosmology. Emily lives in Brooklyn where she is a co-curator of the renowned louderARTS Project Reading Series.