Melanie composed her first poem when she was six. She’d been reading poetry with her father as long as she could remember, so it was natural for her first work to be metered and rhyming.

She wasn’t exactly a girly girl then, and she would grow relatively androgynous as she became aware of boys’ rights and genital unfairness. But she was a first-born to a stylish childish mother, so she’d been outfitted from birth in frilly pastel sets so color-coordinated that they were called ensembles. She was enrolled in ballet class at five. Of course she admired ballerinas and princesses (especially princesses like the one in the Crusader Rabbit cartoons, whose conical cap had a scarf unfurling out of the top).

She’ll always remember that first poem. Not because it was any good, but because it was criminal. She stored it in the little niche in her memory where she keeps her regrets.

It was a poem of two stanzas. The first was her own creation but the second was lifted from a mediocre collection of kid verse. She just didn’t have a second stanza in her when she wrote the first, but she was convinced that a one-stanza piece was no poem at all. As far as Melanie was concerned, a book wasn’t a real book unless it had chapters (and a Table of Contents). So a poem wasn’t serious either, if it was too short.

I am a balleriner
As dainty as can be
And when I act out in a play
I go down one two three

That was hers. In ballet class she practiced to perform, so there was little separating dance from the stage, in Melanie’s view. That’s why lines 3 and 4 could be written about any actress as well as about a performing dancer. Then she searched the books in her room (a paltry collection compared to the set in the den, but private), and came up with:

When at night I go to bed
I look up at the sky
And what do I see?
The moon and the stars looking down at me

When she was done with her composition, she read it with uncertain pleasure. She gazed upon the paper with its carefully penciled letters and she felt satisfied, but the good feeling was a little murky around the edges.

“What are you doing in there?” her mother soon called to her. Her father added, “Come out of your room and join the family.”

So Melanie took herself and her paper to the den. “I wrote a poem.”

“You did? That’s great, honey,” her father beamed. “Let me…” as he reached a hand toward her. “No. You read it to us,” and he settled back in his big chair.

Melanie read the 50 words out loud. She couldn’t tell if her mother was listening, but her dad gave his full attention.

“Wow,” he said when she finished. “That’s a very good poem. It should be published in a magazine.”

Melanie didn’t understand the publishing comment, but she lapped up the praise. At first. Then it tarnished a little in her, and she thought she’d tell her father that the second stanza wasn’t her own. But he seemed so happy right then; she just couldn’t bear to watch his grin flatten. She quietly sat on the floor and joined her brother in his attempt at pickup sticks.

It didn’t stop there. Her father showed her first poem to her aunts and uncles and grandparents. Every adult acted like the poem was far better than Melanie believed, and no one gave her any room to come clean.

Soon she would have spent a magic wish to make the poem disappear, if she could. The more she tried to forget it, and its unease, the faster it held in her memory.