Sticks and stones may crack her bones,
But words will always break her.
Evil laughs and sneers and jeers:
‘Ugly,’, ‘Fat,’, ‘You loser,’
She cried inside, but kept it there;
She wouldn’t let them see.
Those pointy words, they slashed her skin
-left cuts that never healed.
Her heart was scarred all over,
But the worst was yet to come;
The boy at school –with the pretty eyes-
He laughed, then sneered, and jeered.
She lost some weight (she thought it’d help)
Until she ate no more.
Her skin was pale, her eyes were hollow,
And she was barely more than bone.
The taunts had changed, but still they came,
Vicious and all the time;
No longer was she ‘Chipmunk Cheeks’,
He called her ‘Ano-West-ic’.*
Fragile little girl at heart,
She couldn’t take it every day
And so on April twenty-two,
She took a gun to school.
At lunch that day, she didn’t eat,
But that was pretty normal.
She climbed up on the table,
And looked around the room.
They laughed and yelled,
‘Get down from there!’
But she pretended not to hear.
With a steady hand, she raised the gun,
And silence fell like the Guillotine.
Then chaos came, and they fled like deer,
But she was quick; she took aim—
Bang.
Now sticks and stones may crack her bones,
But words will always break her.
The boy with pretty eyes is dead;
But he should’ve seen it coming.
Years have passed, things have changed,
And she’s still skin and bones.
She sits in prison nearing age nineteen
And no one comes to visit.
[* ‘Ano-West-ic’: The girl’s name is Alyra West, and she is anorexic –hence the slightly, clever, but really mean nickname.]
