tw: suicide
...
My brother's friend's little sister
killed herself today.
She would have been 12 or 13
I guess. I never knew her.
Only knew her name.
She hanged herself from the ceiling fan
with a scarf.
My parents discuss it over dinner.
Suicide feels like such a clinical term.
A diagnosis. Thinks nothing,
Understands nothing of the ache
within.
My womanhood is so unbearable some days,
my shoulders sag
my breasts are heavy with an empty want.
I feel closed up.
I don't want to be touched, ever again.
Memory and shame lingers on the outlines
where my body ends and the air begins.
Sadness, like love, can only
be felt through the body.
Even that, has been stripped from us.
I think about dying every day.
Suicide. It's such a metallic word,
feels too foreign on my tongue.
I wonder why she did it.
Is 12 old enough to know when
you don't belong in your body anymore?
I wonder why she did it. I wonder if
we have any right to wonder at all.
YOU ARE READING
Doux
Poetrythe walls with blued body scents soft on the skin, the curtains drawn and a lover asleep close by. ...
