she was always better than me,
when it came to language,
she knew phrases like past imperfect,
she could turn adjectives into anagrams,
she was allergic to the passive tense,
when it came to words, I was a poet,
but she was a tactician, I was in love with
self-indulgent phrases and modifiers, words
that meant nothing, like wonderfully, and beautifully
and lovingly, she
eliminated adverbs with the red slash of her pen,
she was in love with fixing, give her a rough draft and
she would turn it into a masterpiece, her masterpiece,
and hand it back to me and wonder how I didn’t
see it in the first place. She knew
grammar books like the back of the universe, she
thought she knew everything because, if
she ever didn’t, she could look it up, she
was a walking red pen on the
world and I, I was just a poet,
still in love with the world’s words.
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