Her

A brief astonishment poem where damaged self-image gives way to disbelief that intimacy or recognition could still be possible.

'Her' moves from youthful certainty - 'I knew the world / The world belonged to me' - to a battered present where the speaker, 'Stuttering, you khow, scarred', confesses 'I did not touch the sky'. It lands on plain astonishment dressed as national pride: 'It is American, that is what we do / Against all odds / A women likes me'.

The poem's force comes from the gap between the boy who owned the world and the man who can barely believe a woman likes him, with the stutter and the scars standing between the two selves. Preserved misspellings - 'whem', 'khow', the doubled comma in 'sky,,', 'A women' - read as the texture of unguarded speech and, taken together, make the page itself sound like it is stammering at the moment of greatest exposure. 'I did not touch the sky, / even when I thought it saw me' is the heart of the failure: an ambition that imagined itself watched and chosen by the heavens, and fell short. The pivot to 'It is American, that is what we do / Against all odds' half-mocks and half-believes the bootstrap myth, recruiting national bravado to dignify a small private miracle. The closing line is deliberately modest after such grand framing - not the world, not the sky, just one woman's liking - and that shrinkage is exactly what the speaker finds miraculous.