Slam Poems

Skinny Girls Bleed Flowers - Savannah Brown

These are not monsters, there are no monsters here

These feel like love, and when they creep inside you

It's like something once missing is finally coming home.

How could a monster make such pretty girls?

Pretty girls, pretty, skinny girls

They look like everything, that is wonderful about being alive,

Like vodka diet Cokes

And pictures of hipbones at the beach

And "All I've eaten for the past three days is my own fingernails"

And these monsters-not-monsters, can make you pretty, too.

You'll learn to make jokes, about why you're slicing,

The five strawberries you brought for lunch, and breakfast, and dinner

Into twenty-five pieces,

Lifting the morsels from perfectly folded napkin,

With delicate, crackling fingers, to hesitant tongue,

And when the jokes get too cumbersome,

And taste too much like nourishment,

Like letting go, like happiness,

Like learning to put and end to lunch.

Forget what it means,

And by the end, of your last year of high school,

You'll know every spot, in the building,

Where no one will ask where your friends are,

And why you look so tired.

Monster-not-monsters will share their secrets.

You'll learn that needle-thin bones, 

When crushed into a fine paste, 

And stirred into the twenty glasses of water

You were going to drink today, taste like lemonade.

And you can have a sip,

For only, the cost of the rest of your life,

Spent worshipping the feeling of hollow,

Searching up number, and number, and dead girl, and number

You two, can spend the rest of the day,

Smelling of what you just had to scrub off the bathroom floor.

Go, they'll say, outstretching manicured hands,

Bottlecap wrists, memorized menus,

And all the lies you can tell.

Spend hours, at the grocery store, counting.

Fifty, one hundred, two hundred, no more than three,

Or else suddenly, your thighs begin to inflate,

Like the balloons, from all the birthday parties you couldn't go to,

You will learn to avoid celebration, because celebration means food,

You will spend Christmas Day, fantasizing about burying,

Your dissolving teeth into your knuckles until your heart stops.

The not-monsters will feed you your first cigarette.

And your second, and your tenth.

They will leave your once-shiny hair in a clump on your pillowcase, just for you.

And when your body, gets too weak, it starts to crumble,

But where sick breaks skin, sunflowers will grow.

An entire garden, will force itself from your empty stomach,

Billowing out your mouth, and you'll choke,

But you'll be happy, because at least, you're not eating,

You'll decompose, until you cannot be differentiated,

From all the skeletons, that have been living, in your closet,

Don't you wish you could shrink?

Don't you wish, you could have, that control?

Don't you wish, you could make your mom, cry,

Because she just doesn't get why you do this,

You don't get why you do this,

You're smart, but you just Googled,

"How many calories are in toothpaste?"

The pretty girls,

Pretty girls, pretty, skinny girls, pretty, dying girls, pretty, dead girls.

The parasite can be restrained, but not destroyed, but no matter.

It is a beautiful thing, to be made of porcelain.

The picture of your hip bones at the beach was worth it.

--Savannah Brown, Skinny Girls Bleed Flowers