It wasn’t in my plan to start this article this way, but on thinking about the most important parts of Zachary Schomburg’s essay “Poetry As Violence,” I continue to hold in mind his idea that the trauma of violence is in the small details around the violence, and I remember the snippets of memories that occasionally come to me out of nowhere like moths in the night, and that, like moths, I try to bat away before they can land on me. The one that comes to mind first is a confession. It is a memory I’ve told almost no one and I’m telling you here not so you can experience violence, but so you can be humanized in your observance of someone else’s. March 9 (tomorrow, as I write this) marks the sixth anniversary of the day I, at sixteen, downed a bottle of aspirin and tried to go to sleep. What lingers of the violence isn’t the act of swallowing the chalky pills, or the burning in my stomach I couldn’t explain to you if I tried, it isn’t the activated charcoal I forced into my own body, not out of a desire to live but out of the embarrassment of being seen trying not to live.