How I'm Telling It

I read this poem and it just broke my heart. Into maybe 5 pieces at least.

excerpt of "How I'm Telling It"
by Bobby C. Rogers

Even the burns on her arms were a poem to me. I'm' ashamed to say that's what I remember, more than the flatness of her voice, more than the uncertain quality of the brown in her eyes. When I think about it, I should not have been let loose with the language. The words were so new to me then: they rose and sighed at my touch, and pain was just another excuse to hear what the world would sound like in my own broken voice. She had a job in a bakery and I remember her colorless skin festooned with the angry markings of her mistakes, the slightest ungoverned motion as she reached into the dark of the oven, the white flesh on the underside of her wrist, where the skin is smoothest, almost translucent, now marred by an instant's touch with the rolled lip of a loaf pan. The work was done in the black of morning, half awake, when she was half-thinking about the shapes of her own poems. That's how I'm telling it now, the memory or two I have to work from pressed flat and dried by the years. I knew her, it's true, but not enough to ask her what the world was doing to us and how she felt about it. So I am taking that away from her here, all that was inside of her, her voice, the timbre of her thinking, what we may as well call her soul. I can tell you we all worked somewhere, some low-paying job we were glad to get, a five-finger exercise of our lives to come, the lives we said were didn't want, the going to work and paying our own way. We would lave art behind if we could, our notebooks and draft pages packed in the bottom of a box salvaged from a liquor store
incinerator. Maybe it was all for the best. I used to believe any poem would ennoble writer and reader alike. What harm could a poem do? I recited them like lines of a catechism. But listen to me wring her humanity from her: she is a glance, a memory I make pretty, her pain something I will decorate with a word like translucent or festoon. Can it be I still haven't learned the mark a word can make? Forgive me, Father. How does it sound if I say the words touch and we are burned? Does it sound at all like what happens? I still can't quite believe many of the things I know, the cost of the slightest overreaching, no matter how quick we are to pull back, the only words worth using reddened and blistering with our waste passions and hoarded fears.