Petals;
One by one that flourish and wilt but are mine nonetheless.
Everything I have grown and nurtured; these petals and roots of everything I am now, stuffed
Into a dress too tight and sparkly so I might feel glamorous;
Glamorous beneath the eyes of those who measure my entire garden’s worth by the inches of my waist.
The waist that I inhale for the sake of the red rose my rusted mirror craves until I suffocate my organs to indigo rose, tangling them into thorny ribbons;
tightening them to be smaller regardless of their shape in my stomach as my stem bleeds from the contortion of playing pretend.
The little girl within me who never had a chance to even live cries; crying until she throws up;
throwing up as I desperately scrape my fingers against the back of my throat.
I need to be more and less and I will have my shrub of a stomach be as dissatisfied as my image of myself.
I want to have the nectar that bees are drunk upon, not caring if I am used for at least I am desired and then the tears that have watered these pathetic roots and petals are not in vain.
Look at the skeleton carved from my skin.
The graveyard of the little girl with no headstone, only memories corroding in bile at 3 am.
My heart bleeds acid and poison and her veins dig into the dirt, struggling to find more in the unending pit.
The nourishments I've grown to call family praise my artificial red but never seem to hear her slowing beating.
It is muffled,
Muffled beneath my father’s trust issues and my mother’s trust breaking nature.
It is muffled,
Muffled from the start by ears ignorant to it ever even beating and not only being red.
I am a prosthetic of poetry, plastic and tragic.
An attachment to another statistic and story that will unravel from a mute whose words will be believed by everyone.
I am a little girl that wanted a hug and wanted all but one more recess to play pretend for something that really was her dream and not the one that festered beneath the rotten sun of someone else’s world.
Now, I am the same little girl, suffocating in her cocoon forevermore, in a too tight, sparkly dress hoping to feel glamorous at her sweet sixteen and the ribbons grow tighter.
They pierce what was and never has been hers.
Elizabeth Rossi
Grade: 11 / Sec. V
St. Robert Catholic High School
Thornhill, ON
“Being 16 sucks not because supposedly no one understands you but because my expectations have been poisoned by promises of first kisses and effortless glass skin and mothers that hold their daughters every night. The roses suddenly don't seem as enchanting as they did behind those glass windows. ”
Bio
Elizabeth is an eleventh-grade IB student living in Richmond Hill. She enjoys reading, exploring the arts and writing poetry as well as fiction, with the aspiration of publishing her own comics one day. When she's not creating, she can usually be found watching horror movies with her bunny, Minuit.