By Millicent Howard
The girl sat beneath the stairway of life,
Selling bones for a nifty price.
It reminded the outstretched queue of ghouls
That their loved ones were jeweled with fate,
And in the bones laid memories of life to accompany their wait.
In the hours when the veil between life and all else thins,
blurred by the weight of the world,
the girl drifts in her wispy dress.
There, in city deserts and roadside waste,
she gathers her bones— not always human, but life was her taste.
After carefully collecting, she waltzed through fences and walls, shadowless, her worlds intersecting.
When the quiet wore her out, she sought the voices of man
Fighting, yelling, singing, sighing. She yearned to hear their harmonic voices and range of being. The constant peace of the after is most conflicting, and to be strung back to the emotions and poetry of life and grief seemed to keep the universe woven into place.
Through moonlit rooms of sleeping girls, she wandered, watching the slow rise of their breaths, the spill of hair across pillows like rivers of ink. With careful fingers, she braided their ends, tracing their warmth with her cold, smooth touch. Life was a drug—sweet, forbidden— something to savor only from the edges. To know where you come from, even when you must go. Yet she does not remember who she was. She scours for something to stir her awake, to tether her back to form. Hair sprouting from her scalp, irises blooming in the hollows of her gaze, as if epiphany alone could make her whole again.
But what did it matter— the color of her eyes, the blush of her cheeks. She could have been anyone, and still, she ended up here.
A quiet ache, both wasteful and unbearably beautiful.
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