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Literature Text
You don't hate her long, tanned, bendable legs. You don't hate her thin stomach that her legs lead to, or the pert, unreal breasts that jut out above them. You don't even hate the slender arms that lift from her tiny torso and turn in three hundred and sixty different degrees.
You're seven, not stupid. You know you shouldn't look like that, not now, not ever. Your friend even told you that if she were a real person, her proportions would be so off that she wouldn't be able to stand.
It doesn't matter. You still hate her, just not for the reasons everyone else does. You hate her, but not for her body. Instead, it's for her hair and her eyes.
Her hair is long and flaxen blonde, pin straight of course. Yours is dark and curly and barely skims your shoulders. Her eyes are bright blue with flecks of tiny white sparkles. Yours are a muddy kind of hazel that won't sparkle even in bright sunlight.
You won't admit it to anyone, but you'd give anything to be her. She looks like angels in the paintings, or like the supermodels in the magazines, things people aspire to be. People will pay a fortune to have their appearances changed to look like she does. No one would pay a time to be made to look like you.
It's too much to handle, so you take her in your hands. Your fingers circle her arms and chest, and the tips of your thumbs rest under the softer plastic of her chin. You squeeze and press upwards, harder and harder as her head tips back but you still get angrier and angrier until-
POP!
Your curly-haired head detaches from your neck and rolls down your back. Your dark eyes remained open but glazed, which is probably a good thing. Now you can't see that perfect doll fall from your hands, intact and completely invincible.
You're seven, not stupid. You know you shouldn't look like that, not now, not ever. Your friend even told you that if she were a real person, her proportions would be so off that she wouldn't be able to stand.
It doesn't matter. You still hate her, just not for the reasons everyone else does. You hate her, but not for her body. Instead, it's for her hair and her eyes.
Her hair is long and flaxen blonde, pin straight of course. Yours is dark and curly and barely skims your shoulders. Her eyes are bright blue with flecks of tiny white sparkles. Yours are a muddy kind of hazel that won't sparkle even in bright sunlight.
You won't admit it to anyone, but you'd give anything to be her. She looks like angels in the paintings, or like the supermodels in the magazines, things people aspire to be. People will pay a fortune to have their appearances changed to look like she does. No one would pay a time to be made to look like you.
It's too much to handle, so you take her in your hands. Your fingers circle her arms and chest, and the tips of your thumbs rest under the softer plastic of her chin. You squeeze and press upwards, harder and harder as her head tips back but you still get angrier and angrier until-
POP!
Your curly-haired head detaches from your neck and rolls down your back. Your dark eyes remained open but glazed, which is probably a good thing. Now you can't see that perfect doll fall from your hands, intact and completely invincible.
Literature
for her.
it's midnight and I'm writing love letters
on my skin to the woman who raised me. it's midnight
and every limb has a story. all
my collarbone remembers is the frantic
hurry of your footsteps when it broke under the weight
of gravity and mistaken desire to fly and my
broken pink umbrella, long-gone, remembers too. my elbows
remember the firm pull of your hands in the grocery
store. my cheeks remember your makeup and
my clumsy fingers dipping in like paint pots and my neck
remembers all your strands of pearls. I remember
when you were young again and wearing
red and holding cups of tea in hands
that didn't shake yet and I remembe
Literature
Birdcage
Nothing ever happens the way you read in the history books. In war there are never two armies, there is only a field of men. Never a number of dead; but individual lives snuffed out. That is what the subject of history is, years shelved and decimalized. Birth and death, graphed to the simplicity of lines. Great wars a footnote to the next great war. The achievements of men and women plotted out against the bookmark of day, month and year.
And somewhere amongst this, my mother breathed. Somewhere danced in now long-closed nightclubs, laughed at jokes told by a younger version of my Father. And then the unpin-able moment she fell in love with
Literature
Subduction
We drip into October
with the silence of spiders
heavy in our chests,
our hearts curling in
on themselves like
leaves in autumn.
Lungs unfurl into the
stillness;
there is a breath, a whisper--
This dying wind whistles
through empty throats,
as if to murmur a warning,
perhaps, that we threaten
to become
earthquakes
along our hipbones.
Suggested Collections
Actual title: (Not) A Barbie Girl
The deadline for submissions to KU's literary magazine is coming up and I have chosen this piece.
I've posted something like this here before, and that original one has been scrapped (I decided to do that instead of just edit it because I wanted to keep it just in case.)
The idea is still the same- how vanity destroys a person, how futile it is to hate something just because you can't be it, ect. How easy is it to see that? Is it more readable now that I switched it to 2nd-person POV and there's no longer an overabundance of 'She"s?
The deadline for submissions to KU's literary magazine is coming up and I have chosen this piece.
I've posted something like this here before, and that original one has been scrapped (I decided to do that instead of just edit it because I wanted to keep it just in case.)
The idea is still the same- how vanity destroys a person, how futile it is to hate something just because you can't be it, ect. How easy is it to see that? Is it more readable now that I switched it to 2nd-person POV and there's no longer an overabundance of 'She"s?
Comments6
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That's great. I felt like that when I was a little kid. Now I know better,