The poem is about a personal, emotional connection that a teacher makes with her female student, who has written an essay about an incident in which the girl (or her best friend?) was raped. As we read on, we discover that in her youth, the teacher experienced a similar situation when her best friend was raped, but the incident was kept a secret.
The use if "you" in the narration makes the reader feel like the author, or the narrator, is talking directly to him or her, putting them in the teacher's shoes and telling them what they are thinking and feeling as they, the teacher, are reading the student's essay aloud. The descriptions really drew me in. They may be small details, but they are strong images in my mind: "...the hot scent of cotton/ candy and popcorn, everything about her unbearably/ young, from the small, hard apples of her knees/ to the way her braces cage the candy-cotton-stained/ red of her mouth."
Through reading her student's essay aloud, the teacher is able to tell her own story, though it is still a secret. The poem brings to light the idea that we can confront the past by writing about it and transform a painful memory into something beautiful: "So she can know it was no her fault, the most beautiful room in her whole house built from the ugliest mud, terror a blue vowel that kisses the hurt." Reliving a terrible experience after living with the burden of its secret is both a painful and healing process.
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