Using

I pulled her aside one day after class and asked if she was okay. I was sure she was using. Her skin was ashen. There were alarming dark hollows under her eyes. She was so emaciated she looked like one of the living skeletons in a photograph of concentration camp victims. She thanked me for my concern but said she was already in treatment. The next week, she was found dead on the floor of her dorm room. My first thought was that she had overdosed. I later heard it was her heart. Chronic anorexia had fatally compromised it. Every life is a card dealt face down.

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Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.