Young Writers Society

There was a girl.
There was a girl with brown hair and eyes that made a matching set.
There was a girl with dull hair, dull eyes, and a dull spirit to go with.
There was a girl who took a brittle knife in response to a bitter life.

We never guessed that the sturdy-looking bridge would turn out to be a single splintering piece of grass being smashed by the overbearing voices that resemble the frenzy of sharks after blood.
There was a girl who was chased by words shaped like daggers, who was pricked and poked in all the parts we thought could withstand those sour wounds.

I don’t know why we did it.
Because it was funny, I guess.
We thought it was funny, anyway.

There was a girl who lived in pen and paper,
but with doodles of flowers
came twenty more thorns to scratch her mind.
She was reaching out to Beauty
but it snatched its cruel hand away.

There was a girl who inherited a kind of oil from society,
and it wasn't the sweet oil that burns clear and clean.
It was black and slimy tar
that made her smile slip off her face
to fall limp like a worm on the floor.
It made her eyes slip far from my gaze
to focus on something that’s never there when I check.

There was a girl who bored a thousand holes in the horizon.
She drilled the sun out in an afternoon.
And I think that the stars are holes she poked long ago
when her pains were just pins that could float and flicker.
Those stars almost seem joyful
in comparison to the heavy sun
that strains
to make it over the dome
of the day.

There was a girl who lived in reflections.
She put so much weight into a shiny piece of metal that it became a millstone.
She stopped living in the world where stars beat a tattoo on her head,
and she started living in the shadowed, mirrored world where starlight merely rattles around like wind in an empty box.

There was a girl who was trapped in reflections,
and we locked her up and swallowed the key.
And she banged her fists on the walls until red ran down her wrists and obscured the glass further, contorting her tearful face into a mask of brackish blood.
And our laughter wrapped around her, and she wore it like a scarlet cloak with her definition emblazoned on the breast.

There was a girl
whose scarlet cloak
was made of cobwebs
and her smile of the same.
And they both lay in tatters.
So she shore them off
with the knife
that snapped
in half
when she dropped it.

There is a girl who has noticed the glass of the reflecting pond
and is being lured in by the shining pinpricks of pain
to fall (like a girl I once knew)
into the sparkling waters.
There was a girl who wasn't me
but could have been.