Content Warning: This poem contains discussion of self harm, suicide, and mental health challenges, which may be distressing or triggering for some readers. VOX ATL encourages you to prioritize your mental and emotional well-being as you engage with this content. If you need support, please reach out to a trusted adult, mental health professional, or crisis resource.
Tearing desperately into the earth to lie
In a soft coffin of her own choice
her nail bed blossoms, blotches bloom across her body
Her flesh whispers to the bugs in the ground.
Make me a home somewhere.
If life is a woman, then death is a teenage girl
Burying her innocence under her skin
Then clawing
At her own body
To excavate the relief
To release
To gain control over something, even if it’s just the ways she bleeds.
If life is a woman, then death is a teenage girl.
Who stands with a rattling
Of prescription meds in an empty stomach
With the teeth mark of the bathroom floor still gripping her soft skin
– Forgive me if this is the only way I know how to pray –
If life is a woman, then death is a teenage–warping reflection of pill bottles,
and words that morph faces into other shapes
Mind
So decayed that she can only see the endings in her body–
A manual for
How to commit suicide: draw a thousand periods and let the darkness swallow you whole.
If death is a teenage girl, then life is a woman.
Her body is a house of prayer
Composed of tomorrow’s folded inside of tomorrows
Folded inside of forever,
Some nights she looks in the mirror,
Carefully brushing on the eyeshadow of her past
To wear this war
These tiny explosions
Of glittering faith.
If death is a teenage girl, then life is a woman
Her mind, a catalog of verses
Scriptures penned in breath.
She doesn’t cover her scars, just let’s them blend
In
With the flesh
Of every other yesterday
If death is a teenage girl, then life is a woman
Who lets the hours linger in her mouth a little longer
And paints the sky across her face
Who puts her hand on her heart just to feel the cannon fire of her pulse
And the warmth blossoming across her chest
If death is a teenage girl, then life is a —
Alter made of flesh and blood
A mother of cells
Who wipes her adolescent fingernails clean
Picks her up off the ladder
And carries her into the rest
of her
Tomorrows.
