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