When
Once I Was Your Girl
I
have never been her,
Or
free of comparisons to her.
What
I have been—
A
catalyst and a bridge—
Has
never been enough.
Your
opinion of me was negotiable,
And
your knowledge had failed.
You
had seized the dream
To
change it,
And
not to give it a name.
Obsession
fueled your quest,
And
a myth had become your woman.
The
answer to a dream,
Or
a nightmare in disguise.
I
forget how long it’s been,
But
we had become like strangers--
And
there are stories we no longer tell ourselves,
About
how this had come to be.
I
didn’t know what every shadow meant,
Or
how all of the pieces fit,
But
the threats to our alliance,
Were
sometimes from within.
There
was nothing that would survive,
But,
once, it was difficult to know.
I
didn’t question how it happened then,
But
there would be much for me to grieve—
When
once I was your girl—
And
you were all I knew.
Retta
Lewis
I've been writing for
many years. Some of my work has appeared in past journals like Onionhead,
Free Focus, Wide Open Magazine, and Up Against the Wall, Mother, and more
recently my work has appeared in Children, Churches & Daddies, Caveat
Lector, Rigorous, Ephemeral Elegies, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and
Penumbra Online. My day job is working in a field devoted to the
prevention of Domestic Violence.