By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A dramatic anecdote that turns poverty and street danger into a rough, darkly comic encounter with God.
The poem reports a young, 'good looking' woman whose own words drive the scene: she 'didn't have the money / for a cab', or 'a / telephone booth', and was bringing her 'bottels in to the / store for recycling' when 'armed / men came in to rob the place'. Her line under the gun - 'get out, cause / I guess this is the way to find / Out, about God that is...' - turns a stickup into an accidental religious reckoning.
Built almost entirely from quoted speech, the poem lets the woman narrate her own poverty in escalating denials - no cab fare, no dime for a phone - so that the recycled 'bottels' become the precise economy she lives in, where returned glass is real money. The robbery breaks in mid-anecdote, and her instinct is protective ('get out'), aimed outward at the speaker even as she stands in the danger. The astonishing turn is her reading of the holdup as theology: a brush with armed men becomes 'the way to find / Out, about God', as if mortal threat were the only available revelation. The trailing '...' leaves the thought and the encounter unfinished, refusing the punchline a joke would supply. The title's tender 'so young' frames the whole thing as elegy or wonder rather than mockery, and the preserved spellings ('bottels', 'cause') keep the retelling in the grain of street speech.