Kaleidoscopes
Kaleidoscopes
formed around the inner rims of my pupils
the moment you touched me
playing back images of your mouth
and projecting them as scenes
from a horror movie
Something like the one you played onto a dirty bed sheet
one stripped from my mattress and slain
onto your garage
The horror movie was an excuse
to hold me as tightly as you wanted
And you held me tighter than I wanted
said you were protecting me from the monsters
But the ghosts under my bed hadn't come out
until you ripped off their sheets
They hadn't reached for me
until they felt your figure on my mattress
Kaleidoscopes
in your cinematic smile
turned your threats into compliments
Turned me counterclockwise
as you held me up to your eyes,
Turned me until I could only think
in geometric patterns
You held me so tightly that I went numb to everything
but the feeling of falling crystals in a
Kaleidoscope falling like I had fallen under the cloud of exhaust as you slammed the car door
Like I had fallen after you told me you couldn't lose me and spun the wheel counterclockwise After you accelerated under a bridge
but on the other side I found
Kaleidoscopes colliding with glass
Scattering the shards of crystal
Highlighting my bruises
my gashes
your frozen sneer
Kaleidoscopes on the rims of my dilated pupils
had twisted your actions before they reached my brain
Made me forget I was just your passenger
While you drank my tears from a flask
But the smashed car on the highway
Was a shattered kaleidoscope
I saw straight yellow lines and traced them
Away from the wreckage
The confusion
The monsters
From the red sheet ghost on the road
From the exhaust
The horror movie
But you were the horror movie
And your hands
Gripping the steering wheel
Cannot turn me.
She Matured Early
She matured early.
She felt the gears in her brain
turn faster than her classmates’
Felt an inferno run fiercely through her veins
before they could light a single spark
She pulsed with electricity.
She learned to hold a paintbrush
and promptly created a masterpiece
Made a map of the ocean
with her eyes closed.
But knowing the ocean so early
made swimming seem slow
By age 9 she had memorized
every starfish and seahorse beneath the waves
and now her nerves quiver
as she feels her classmates gaining on her fins
She wills the electricity to coarse faster through her
and searches for new parts of the ocean to map.
Maturation has kept her swimming strongly
but her flotation device is losing air
Soon the school of fish will reach her
and pierce the water beside her
Together they will follow the current
she has always felt
in her veins.