End Notes
What the Bruxer Told Me
A poem by Erik K. St. Louis, M.D.
The things she couldn’t,
shouldn’t, wouldn’t dare
say, come out this way:
In sleep, she grinds it
all over, over—
out it comes. Today
no answer for the
halfway house teen girl
whose father, brother,
had brutalized. No
words for her today,
but tonight, grinding
it over, she tells
the inscrutable,
stolid night again.
Erik St. Louis is a neurologist at Mayo Clinic.