I can’t help rolling my eyes. I do not care about some poem. But I perch on the edge of the chair next to her. I add foot tapping to my finger drumming.

“It’s at the end, after the last chapter.” She flips the book closed and then open. “It’s written by him.”

“The Sky Has Many Secrets,” she reads aloud.

I remember the one star winking at me. My foot stops tapping.

Mattie reads silently. Her eyes move back and forth across the page, a wrinkle forming above her nose. I know I get the same wrinkle because Tristan always tickles it when I’m reading aloud to him. A chill runs up my spine. She stops reading. She’s like stone, like granite. She doesn’t say anything but then pushes the book toward me. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to be frozen like Mattie. I want to keep tapping my foot and being annoyed. But I read.

The Sky Has Many Secrets

by Francisco Gómez Flores

I’ve seen the stars wandering

Across an Amazonian sky

Above the red flames of cooking fire

Over a dusty Andean trail

Beneath the yellow glow of the moon

Goddess

Some nights, the stars

Tell stories of loss

They are the tears of children

Sisters

Daughters of mine

If I could reach across the sky

Would they meet me halfway?

After I read the poem, I read it again. Mattie reads it again, too. Both of us are mouthing the words under our breath. Amazonian. Moon. Children. Sisters. Daughters. I don’t look at Mattie, but I can feel her next to me, our bodies that look so much alike taking up the same space in this college library. It’s weird, but I swear I can feel something—like a thread—connecting us. For a moment, neither of us move. Around us, students are beginning to pack up their books and laptops. They have a Friday kind of energy.

“It’s about us,” Mattie whispers.

Great, I’m frozen, too. I swallow the annoying lump in my throat. “Maybe, maybe not.” I try to sound as breezy as possible, but the lump makes my voice crack. “I mean, poems are weird like that.”

But I know that poems tell the stories they’re meant to tell. My English teacher last year told me that I had a gift. She loved my poems. It’s easy to write a poem. You just put words on the page, words that pop into your brain, words that rearrange themselves in the air before you write them down and somehow, they mean something—maybe something you meant to say and maybe something completely different—to the person reading them. Like your teacher.

Or your daughters.

“What…,” Mattie begins. “I mean, why…” She turns to me as if I have the answers, but all I have is questions.