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Featured Poem: V1:I3 - Rachel Oates

Broken girls are not romantic:

I am not smudged eyeliner and backcombed hair

I am not a solitary tear on a rainy day,

I am not a glorious hurricane,

I am the destruction left behind by the storm,

unable to repair myself.

I do not smoke a cigarette in the night and sigh,

I slam my head against the wall

Until my neighbours call the police

And I run barefoot into the streets

wild but not free.

I am not a wanderer or a free spirit,

I am lost:

I know my way through these alien roads

But not how to navigate my own mind.

None of this feels like my own;

I have had my mind and body thrust upon me by foreign hands

And I can't settle in these too small metal, mental walls

Pressure rising, skull caving in,

So I slam and slam and slam

Hoping to crack the shell to let the burning inside out

As it bubbles and boils and scars.

Ice seeps into my soles and I shake.

I am not a beautiful project to be completed,

I am unstable, unsolvable, unlovable, lost

and abandoned.


Rachel Oates

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3 comentarios


Ken LeMarchand
Ken LeMarchand
23 ago 2022

Couldn't ask for a better motif of what it is like to be human underneath all those stigmas that surround womanhood. All the expectations, all the glitz and glam, all the inner strife rising to the surface and begotten by the truth that is a person's understanding of self. What I'm trying to say is, this is a stable and lovable poem.

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Shen Friebe
Shen Friebe
23 ago 2022

I absolutely loved this! She nailed it.

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Adam Gary
Adam Gary
23 ago 2022

Wow, beautiful stuff!

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