For as long as I
can remember, my body
has never been a home.
For me, never, for others,
sometimes a place to stay
warm for a little while
pre-flight or post-haste,
a place to stay, sometimes,
a home, not at all.
It’s hard to stomach
how much I let it hurt
me, this skin bag of bones
that carries my soul
around in its dark little
interior. Still,
I turn my back on it most days
to contort what is flexible and
despise what cannot be changed.
You don’t know any of this.
You ask questions
about the way I touch myself
and linger in mirrors and I
escape you only by the skin of my teeth.
You must think that
I’m so vain and you’re right,
after all, self-loathing is its own
kind of conceit, I think
that’s David Foster Wallace
who said something
of that persuasion.
Anyway, stay safe in the promise
that I will never tell you these things,
any of them, about the way
my body melts like
a bulb of wax in the sun,
I could never have a hand
in my own demise like that.
But I know you don’t mind
that you will never have my eyes;
you have your own
and the rest of me too, the parts
that matter, the tangle of my arteries
the sparkle of my neurons
blue, and all my dark
interiors
so for now, I only wish
I could look upon myself
with you as my prism, to see
how you see
or better yet
to turn myself inside out
and meet you, heart first.
Regina Caggiano is a 20 year old emerging writer and Literary Arts student. She lives on the cold part of the East Coast where and has never meaningfully left New England Her work has appeared in Crash Test Magazine, 805 Lit + Art, and is forthcoming in Beyond Words Literary Magazine and Ember Chasm Review. More of her work can be found at regina-caggiano.wixsite.com/writing
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