because i might get scratched by the barbed-wire necklace

you like to wear.

it is a deadly decoration that reminds me of the frontier.

and the slicing up of the land.

you’ve had it for so long that it’s getting rusty.

it is a barbed-wire fence that surrounds your heart,

hanging delicately around your neck.

It wasn’t super eloquent or memorable, but it felt real, and for right now that was enough.

Her mom wrote entirely different kinds of poems, more traditional and rhymy, but dabbling in poetry was something they actually had in common.

For Tessa, poems were a way to express emotions that couldn’t be stated outright.

She’d tried explaining that to one of the girls at school once when she said she didn’t “get” poetry. “Poetry isn’t something you get,” Tessa had told her. “It’s something that quivers inside of you with truth that you can’t quite articulate but that you feel.”

“Poetry quivers?” Candice had said.

“Yeah. I mean, sort of. Reading a poem is like flirting with some cute guy, not like sitting in biology class. Or at least it shouldn’t be.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Okay, well, did you ever have to dissect frogs in biology class?”

“Yeah.” Candice squinched up her face in disgust. “Ew.”

“Well, most English teachers treat poems like biology teachers treat frogs. They think that cutting them open, peeling them apart, probing into them, and identifying their different parts is the best way to understand them rather than watching them in the wild and marveling at how they move.”

“Who marvels at a frog?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Yeah, no. I get it. I guess.”

Tessa continued. “They’re like, ‘See that simile there? The author is telling us he’s really suicidal.’ ‘And here, we have Shakespeare writing in iambic pentameter. Let’s take the next hour and totally cut the heart out of his work of art. It’ll be so much fun.’ Just like the biology teacher is doing when he hands out the dissection knives.”

“Okay, I think that’s enough with the whole dead-frog thing.” Candice looked pale. “Get back to the cute-guy part.”

“So when you see him, your heart races, right? You can’t keep your eyes off him. And you don’t want to take a knife or whatever and cut him open. You want to kiss him. To feel his lips against yours. To hold him in your arms.”

A sly smile. “That’s not all I want.”

“My point is the only way to really write a poem is to stop thinking of it as a way of communicating an idea or getting a point across, but as a way of breathing life into words.”

“Sorta like Frankenstein, making them alive?”

“Sort of.”

“So give me an example. Not a dead-frog poem. A cute-guy-with-his-lips-against-mine poem.”