"Evergreen" by Laura Saint Martin

Here they come, the

apartment block girls, hard-lipped and smelling

of deep fry and cigarettes, angry girls sleeping

four-deep in

boarded back bedrooms, furious girls

brimming with unwanted overtures

from aged uncles, overcrowded girls

strangled by their own bras. Those girls have

beautiful names and complex hearts,

the complexes where they live have pastoral names,

like Evergreen and Springtree,

Rosewood, Mountainview,

names memorialized in police reports.

Those girls are known entities. Those girls

will kill you for a Snickers bar. Those girls are

drowning and wouldn’t know a lifeline

if it jumped down their throats.

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Laura Saint Martin is a semi-retired psychiatric technician, grandmother, jewelry artist, and poet. She is working on a mystery/women’s fiction series about a mounted equestrian patrol in Southern California. Sha has an Associate of Arts, and uses her home-grown writing skills to influence, agitate, and amuse others. She lives in Rancho Cucamonga, CA with her family and numerous spoiled pets, and has dedicated her golden years to learning what, exactly, a Cucamonga is. She works at Patton State Hospital and for Rover.com. She can be contacted at two.socks@hotmail.com.