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