I saw pictures of stardust, and gloved hats.
Baseball mittens on wire fences, and children donned in
grey trench coats. Beautiful, I thought, scouring my eyes
away from horrific scenes. Beautiful as the world. And Beautiful,
they said too, because their eyes were clear, unlike mine.

Cloudy eyes, they began calling me. I swam in baths of
choking fingers and yellowed hair, bleeding cries of
joy and ecstatic sounds. I did not understand, clumsy as
the mind I was gifted with. Take it away! I sobbed when I was
a child, confronted with tears and broken minds.

Beautiful, I told myself on days of fire and red
hands. Beautiful, I whispered to my cousin when she dreamt
of monsters and black-eyed men. My world hung on a spiderweb
of beauty that my heart danced along, on teetering-tottering
motions of given bravery .

do you love the world? they ask, like questions on knives, and fork-edges,
dangling pictures of the beautiful, and the terrible . . .
Say yes, it begs me, but I hold my tongue. Say Yes, I urge,
and I do.

My sister sleeps in lazy, drug-induced hazes. She bounces
Little Cousin on her shin, until legs go tumbling, and fists land
on a floor of shiny, tarnished wood. The cries of an infant, swarm
the cold room, and I
don’t understand what I must do here, in rose-colored glasses, and
broken shards that slip from my eye-sockets and gather, twanging
against the wooden floor.

Beautiful, my heart says to me as I watch her
stain the floor red, red
burgundy, lifeless,

screaming red.


beautiful.