Why the girl? by Nicole Farmer "I'm so sorry" comes out of my mouth and I know the words do not suffice. What should I have said? My new friend has just told me his daughter was a real free spirit, how he is writing songs about her for the first time. He says she was murdered five years ago. How to describe the rest of my evening? How I cried in my car the whole way home, imagining the mysterious undeserved death of an untamable girl just turned twenty. With no details except "she got herself in a bad situation", my mind races. Why is it always the girl? Girls die at the hands of a man hundreds of times a day, for hundreds of reasons: he wanted her body, he was ashamed of her body, he was ashamed for wanting her body, he wanted her money, he resented her money, he had to punish her and take her money, he hated her freedom, he was threatened by her freedom, he wanted her freedom, he took her freedom to feel better about resenting her freedom, she was in his way, she should pay for being in his way, he was attracted to her and it was her fault, he had to rape her and kill her in order to feel better about the fact that he resented her, he had to rape her because he could not control himself, and that was her fault, so she deserved to die, this girl - any girl - who is simply there, and inconvenient to his agenda. This timeless tragedy plays out again and again. What to say? I can only hold his hand and listen, if he should ever want to speak again about the father he once was.
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Three poets and three poems: Nicole Farmer, Jerome Berglund, and Patricia Cannon – Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast
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Nicole Farmer is a reading tutor living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in The Closed Eye Open, Quillkeepers Press, Capsule Stories, Sheepshead Review, Roadrunner Review, Wild Roof Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, Great Smokies Review, Kakalak Review, 86 Logic, Wingless Dreamer, Inlandia Review, In Parentheses, and others. Nicole has been awarded the First Prize in Prose Poetry from the Bacopa Literary Review and has just finished her first chapbook entitled ‘Wandering Not Lost’. Way back in the 90’s she graduated from The Juilliard School of Drama. You can find her dancing barefoot in her driveway on the full moon at midnight.
