Plastic Pools
Your crooked God spun cancer
With a great almighty hand,
Commanding his wraiths to pick away at flesh—
The very flesh around my soul,
Keeping me compact and one
And binding my extremities.
For he's the one who pierces me
Through hypertrophic tissue,
Leaving me septic, aching in his wake,
With virus seeping into skin.
My greatest organ living that can fail me—
Total organ failure and seethe.
(Seethe, seethe, seethe)
The split between my conscious
And my neurotic mind
Has been dissolving since the day I abandoned utero,
And it braces me for impact.
Pulsating beneath layers of weak muscle,
Beneath mounds of bulging intestines.
I dreamt it'd be a monster who
Would someday cannibalize me,
Instead it's an angel with silken skin.
White teeth——Glass eyes
Barren belly——Burnt tongue
Angels of glossy tabloids
And patron saints of slaughter farms.
Mine is a mean one.
Mine is a slaughterhouse pig.
Mine is visceral loveless.
Mine has scars three miles wide and four more deep.
Mine is swallowing a knife
Every lonesome night
For every day you've been alive.
And what is there to grow into,
When the only body I own is the very one trying to kill me.
When the pus expelling from the hole in my chest
Is still a part of me,
Even though it keeps me sick.
So we'll give the sickness a name
As though it were alive.
Feeble envy, dysmorphic, disorderly.
My parasitical host——
I adore it when you drain me,
And loathe when you weaken.
A silk-lined casket, a faceless tomb,
Sinking into your marshy lawn——
Your backyard mausoleum,
Rotting with the remnants of a
Thousand other girls you'd once kept in the same jar as I.
You were my false God.
I don't fear you, I don't fear you,
I am so small,
Nothing in the light of you.
A day will come where
I swim once again in plastic pools.
The heat of summer sunshine will blanket me in hazy,
yellow warmth,
Awakening me to my bones.
Here, my reflection does not exist—
It never did.
Ghosts no longer sigh that I am not worthy of my
consciousness.
I'm wearing a heavy garbage bag,
Cystic acne,
Thinning, bristly hair,
And a brown paper mask.
I am beautiful,
And so are you.
ELEANORA SHELLEY is a 16-year-old high school student currently residing in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Her works often focus on life’s darker and more controversial subjects.