1
The train moved smooth across the landscape as if the whole universe were covered in black ice. 
When he greeted me at the station I could smell deceit.  It breathed through his skin.  We took a 
wagon up the steep hill to the town, if you could call it that.  A muddy hill sheathed in newly rutted 
streets.  We got out at a place on First, not a hotel as I’d been told, but a brothel.  I could smell the 
sweat and sin. It oozed into the dark mud.  When I screamed he grabbed my arm, looked me in the 
eye and said, you’ll either fuck the men I bring to you, or starve.  

2 
When he threw me in, the attic was lit with the gold lace of sun shining through the beams. Only the 
gold can keep me I thought, my mind swelling with hunger behind the locked door.  

3
At first light, the room illumes: a dusty box of hats, a dirty mattress curled into the corner, a few 
sheets of crumbled paper, a pen.

And so I began the letter to my mother. It was a lie.  Please save me.  I am locked in an attic on First Street 
in Pithole, PA.

I fold it carefully, slip it between the slats of the wooden room that contains me, and watch it flutter 
down to the dark, dark mud of the street below.

4
There are so many swollen days.  My body gone black and blue with beatings. My mind tethered 
from my body.  A star that blinks from far off. 

How the letter was found and mailed is beyond me.  But one afternoon I woke still blurred in sleep 
and muted by hunger to hear a thunder of men in the downstairs.  I was carved in golden light – like 
each piece of me would break off into tiny wings, when the door was kicked in.

My mother walked in tear-streaked.  She gathered me up.