Sugar and spice and similar bullshit

Grandpa says god made little girls out of sugar and spice and everything nice,

and I guess I wouldn’t know because there was no god in the house I was raised, 

but there is no sugar in girlhood, either,

and I wonder if this, too, was lost in translation.

If I could add a stanza to sacred scripture,

pagan turned prophet,

girls would be splinter and stone and those fragments of bone,

ground to dust by a world resting on their shoulders.

Maybe girlhood is knowing that your world is small but words cut deep,

and when you carry something for long enough you forget how to put it down.

You begin to think that these too-small fingertips are enough to hold a glass globe overhead,

That they are enough to stop the silver spiderweb of cracks that snake across its surface,

Girl playing god, 

but god is a man other people believe in,

and sugar doesn’t taste as sweet when you can’t tell it apart 

from the ground glass glittering on your empty palms.