4she's a sugar-sweet thirteen-year-old;
naive (even for her age)
and smiling like the child she is.
Her too-tight jeans are torn and frayed, battered and salted,
from overuse - crashing through the dark, wet forest,
from slamming herself to the silvered docks
amongst the sail canvas and chips of fibreglass
and laughing into the wind on a heeling, ancient boat
that creaks with strength and age
everytime the boom crashes over and a chorus of shouts greets the sulking skipper.
In the picture,
she is sitting on a fence post
on a weathered Alberta farm, and we are behind her -
her faithful prairie cousins who swing in and out of her
perspective as she comes and goes with her coast-born tides.
She is smiling through her newly braced teeth,
all freckles and deep tan and honey blond hair.
There is a soda pop bottle dangling from her fingers.
The picture is now pushpinned to the wall
in her skid row apartment, cold Vancouver air
carrying all the rain and cigarette smoke
of the city's East Side past its browning image.
Why she left the apartement, we'll never know -
her broken body would float up in the Victoria Gorge two weeks later.
We don't know why she died, or who killed her, if she didn't kill herself.
And I was standing in the scorching sunlight of the Garden City when they pulled her
out, and I couldn't focus
on the blue, blue sky, or the girl's twisted body,or the police sirens wailing in the background-
only on the smashed soda bottle
lying on the sidewalk behind me.