i don't know girlhood the way the poets describe it;
to them it is peach pits and bruised knees,
running free, no eroticism, no outward femininity.
it is a beautiful thing, no hidden blades and bloody gums.
but this is not the girlhood i know -
girlhood is not peach pits and rosy cheeks and sunstained skin.
i have never known a youth free from the chains of sex and sadness.
everything that you say and do is a knife in your own belly, every spare word a twisting at the hilt.
fear and lust and loathing, they build up in your piggybank -
coins of hatred and insanity.
girlhood has long been misdiagnosed, and i feel it raw in the lining of my teeth and lungs.
if this is a fruit, it has long gone sickly sweet with decay, like some rotting wild animal chewing at the flesh.
the peach pit i know is this -
i swallow it whole, and in that rotting corpse of my abdomen it
mutates. cyanide like a fire in the heart of my very
being. this girlhood, these stones, poison,
to be taken like pills. don't bother with
the label - ingestion should be avoided -
because you will, inevitably,
force feed yourself the venom of girlhood.
