O not enough silence

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I am cold, cold and colder

and companionably darker, and haunt these backstreets

and dimlit rooms. I lift my swollen right leg over the dimwit banisters,

and display to the world my tarlike womb. It is all very eerie and alien

and so not many people look up at this starshow of pain,

clustered between my water-thighs, balefully inhuman,

cold, cold and hungry and a bad thing to See. Starving. Someone else turns away

from my fraudulent body in the still night. I am still too open. Most of my Insides

are now on the Outside for Strangers to Observe, in order of secrecy,

and the most private is farthest and easiest to notice. Out of this Opening

there are things crawling quietly into the black. Some other things replace them

but of course these others are yet foreign, unintroduced horrors,

we should learn to get acquainted, but people are Staring

oh no, I must have grown kinder.

 

Published April 2018 in di-verse-city 2018, the youth anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival.

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