when you have cast off your lace-edged ivory notions of girlhood,
you will bleed.
when you first flee the village in pursuit of a daydream,
you will crawl through brambles and climb thorn-laden walls
that steal an inch of your young skin for each breath of freedom.
you will learn that to be free is to be loose,
and no mere cloth will shield you from the leering eyes of man,
no matter how fiercely you flinch from their ravenous gaze.
when you find beauty, you will learn you are ravenous too,
that starvation will not quell the hunger that splits your flesh.
you will wrap your curious tongue around the tenderest of fruits
and waste a fortnight tasting a heathen’s heaven before waking
naked and ashamed of your own gluttonous heart.
when you have begged your own soul not to seek the reaper
and bled away every drop of your family line
when you have found home in the hands of a hardened stranger
and broken your own heart to spare him your cruelty
when you have raged and wept and shattered
to form a woman from the fragments of a girl
soaked in scarlet, held together by sheer will,
you will recall my wild youth with a twinge of sisterhood
as a bright-eyed girl of 18 stares incredulously
at you, attorney at law, cruel creature
with an angel’s face and a serpent’s bite,
a bad woman. she vows she’ll never be
so wicked, so wrong. she swears she is good
not like you.
not like me.
