I think this poem-- again, it's about when I was very young.
And I think it tells its own story, really.
It's called "Zimmer Guilty of the Burnt Girl".
"Once a week, the burnt girl came pedaling to our house,
touching her sweet rolls with raisin fingers.
Her raw face struggling like a bubble through lava
to say what she had to sell and why.
Please buy my sweets to mend my face.
Always I hid behind the piano and heard my unflinching mother
quietly buy a few and imagined apricots shriveling in sun,
spiders boiling and dripping above matches.
Always when the burnt girl had gone,
I heard my mother drop her purchase
in the rubbish to be burned.
And I came out to see the pink grafting,
the horrid sugared layers of the rolls.
I do not want the burnt girl to come again.
I am guilty for her and of her.
Always in fever I think of that face.
Sometimes in love, I believe that I am fire,
consuming myself.
And the burnt girl suffers from her love,
from my love, as she sells her rolls to mend her face."