wrapped tightly
in rusty barbed wire
the caged heart beats
listless and erratic
an out-of-time clock…
tick-tock
cruel thorns stab
draws tainted blood
that drips poisonous and black
down constricted ribs
forged by shame and blame…
plop-plop
©️2023 jai
Image by Birgit Röhrs from Pixabay
People are looking at me funny, especially the ladies at the registers, ’cause I come here nearly every day. But I can only buy what I can carry home. Mama can’t come and we need food, and if anyone finds out Mama can’t come, me and Lizzy and Josh will have to go to one of those foster homes. And they ain’t good places to be.
I know ’cause I was put in one last year. Lizzy and Josh was put in them too.
My third-grade teacher, Miss Fincher, had seen my busted lip and had called someone and they’d picked me up at school and taken me to this place where a woman in white had looked at me all over, my privates too. I hadn’t liked that one bit. Then she’d told a big woman with red hair that I had been “physically abused.”
nowhere is safe I’ve heard it said one place is safe— inside my head there, no one can touch there, no one can hurt there, I am a rock solid, hard—a little girl cursed half a century of walls erected, plastered, pasted, glued hold the pieces of me together never to be moved do not look for a door for no opening will be found ironclad, it shelters an innocent child who built her safe place around a damaged mind a tormented heart protected from the monsters who gleefully tore her apart no comfort for this little child for no one can enter this castle deep all alone, forever alone she sits there yet and weeps ©2023 jai
On the Fringe of Darkness 