‘erinville I’ 

By Jessica Anne Rose

​

 

I am much too old for this body of mine.

This gangly frame of a thirteen year old,

Etched like a whisper, a charcoal smearing. My face is muddied

When I attempt to picture it, all that I can assemble in the blankness

Are sharp Rorschach limbs jutting out from underneath a tinfoil blanket.

 

Each thought is barbed and rips ravines into an already overcrowded cortex.

Every waxy sheet of skin is coated in coarse hair. I am like some forgotten

Animal, just hatched, blotched eyes stretched too wide.

I have been left to survive in an arena of brick and gravel.

 

Somebody has forgotten to tell me the rules, I say.

Someone has misplaced me, I am no girl, no human,

I am a twitching beast about to be sliced open

By hyenas in school uniforms, by the owls in lab coats.

 

The owls surrounding me smooth a quilt over my head,

Hushing my faint cries that I am not quite right,

But that would mean that they are not quite right.

I watch their eyes dilate as they grow clinical and distant,

Robotically adding to piles of pills, eyes clicking back

And forth at each other, never quite noticing me beneath them.

 

I spell out the word LOST in every way I can conjure,

But no oddity comes to steal me to my true home. I never wake

Without the dread that is skinning away what consists of this

Milky blue body. It pulses and hiccups, stubbornly alive.

I am much too old for this body of mine.

I have been here far too long.