In 1984, Britt Elizabeth Verstegen was a seventeen-year-old girl who wanted to end her life. Forced to live with the man who sexually abused her as a pubescent child and the mother who physically and emotionally abused her for not accepting him, Britt began to unravel and descend into depression and suicidal ideation. To cope, she skipped school and took the Warren bus downtown to spend days in the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Main Library drawing, reading and dissociating. The old people she met on the bus were her salvation. These poems are dedicated to them.