Some Days I Wonder

You are a girl.

You are a girl with bruises running up your legs

like polka dots.

With dirt caked under your fingernails,

With sadness etched into your forehead

like stitched quilts,

Carrying fear around in your back pocket.

If you were an accurate representation

of your soul,

Then you would be white knuckles all of the time,

Gripping tightly to the edge of something

you cannot name.

You are a girl who dresses down,

Or dresses up,

You are taught to dress for other people.

You wrap yourself in chameleon skin

made to ward off the sins of the feminine.

You wield pencils like pocket knives,

sharpening teeth on razor wire,

You sleep only when the sun comes up,

so you can be sure nothing waits to accost you

in your bed.

You’ve bled more

than everybody in the world,

By the time you are 10

you have been drowned in war.

But you are a girl,

So you are acquainted with filing and

stitching needles

And they sew your lips together.

And they bind your hands behind your back,

And they make you swallow your tongue.

They shake their fingers in your face.

Because You’ll never catch a man if you keep acting this way.

And you are grasping at the threads

you so loosely held onto.

You are used for warning words,

“The girl with the God complex”

with an ego that floods her shoes.

The girl who can’t change anything,

The girl who must be mindless,

Weaving insanity into her hairbands.

And this is the price you pay

for reaching towards something more

For discarding make-believe chains,

You are bloodshot veins

and tears made of gasoline.

You would light yourself on fire

for the chance to be whole.

You are so ugly,

But who on earth deserves to be pretty?

You are burnt underwire,

And melted handcuffs,

And an education.

Or at least you try to be,

Fingernails crusted and jagged-

It is not hard to want to fit in so badly

and some days, you are weak.

Hands limp and frail and aching and praying for ending-

And some days you hold the world in fists made of iron.

I am not sure which days are harder on you.

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