Max Gilman '25

by Max Gilman '25 on November 12, 2023
Portfolio Co-Editor

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trauma walks vein lines, blood clots like 

streetlights,

she lost her hair,

many fathers, many words devour her, 

she became a comet of backroads,

a dull cobbler with less to say than a politician’s

pocket,

she changed her name and money noticed,

like a blue ocean, her eyes grew tar

from oil under her roof and wrappings over her telescope,

her wrists pulse.

Never enough light, she drinks blood,

brown’s spit, thirty three,

ruby red, the mind destroyer,

she turned thirty-four before winter,

her skin burns a harsh blush, blue,

if red was red, eyes

grew on her teeth, splintered iris became

bloodshot familial roots, 

tucking armpits, thorns in her side,

on a long road alone she finds hair a lie,

latest at night, for shadows to hide

in-side her mind, trauma died and sold,

moon told her

blue is red—  no more, enough said.

and two mornings ago she left her body,

like a comet with every direction,

she 

blazed 

through 

backroads and forgot hair,

found a beetle

it looked like a dissolving blood-clot.

December one, gray.

and the time has come for untimely death

or the rat that follows.