A/N: Just a little poem I wrote on Winter. Because of stupid formatting, I had to put a little three-pound (###) thing between stanzas in order to keep the line breaks. Anyway, I hope you like it, and please review to let me know your thoughts!
Disclaimer: I don't own the Lunar Chronicles. Unfortunately, I am not Marissa Meyer.
Winter
My mother named me
after the season
of death
and beauty.
###
I never understood exactly
what that word meant.
Beauty.
What was it that made
someone beautiful?
Full lips, wide eyes,
sloping cheekbones,
flawless figure?
But how
did someone define
flawless? How
did they rank someone
on a scale of one to ten based
not on their mind, not
in the beauty embedded
in their veins, but in
their skin?
###
Snakes could shed
their skin. I'd had one
as a little girl, kept it
in a terrarium made
of thick-paned glass.
Once, I'd dipped
my hand inside,
attempting to wind
the elusive creature
around my wrist, coil
it around my fingers,
feel the cool scales press
against my thrumming veins.
But instead, I'd felt something
like plastic, crinkling beneath
my fingertips, like
a Hershey bar wrapper
or a Ziploc bag.
I'd pulled it out, gazed
at the translucent skin, traced
the imprints of scales still imprinted
in the discarded waste.
###
And then
I'd wrapped that
around my wrist, too,
used the snake's skin
as a bracelet
until my stepmother
ripped it off.
###
They'll call you
crazy, she hissed.
###
Let them, I thought.
I am crazy.
###
Humans, I'd learned,
could shed skin just
like snakes. Dust
was almost entirely composed
of human skin. Sometimes,
I'd dive underneath my bed
and collect globs
of the stuff, put it
in jars and line them up
on my windowsill. In late
afternoon, when the sun hit them
at just the right angle,
the sunlight shimmered
a smoky gray, ashes
in a fireplace.
###
Skin was what made
a person beautiful, but
it dripped off us
every day, like honey slipping
from a silver spoon.
We oozed and leaked it,
and the skin built up
beneath our beds,
on our pillows,
in the jars on our windowsills,
until we were no longer beautiful
at all.
###
Some people called it
aging. I called it
shedding skin.
###
People thought I was
beautiful. They looked at me,
compared me to others
standing around, and called me
wondrous, a heavenly angel,
applauded my figure and my face.
Their eyes traced
the contours of my body,
of my cheeks,
searched my eyes
and found perfection.
I smiled politely and thanked them,
because that is what you do
when someone calls you beautiful,
when someone finds you perfect,
even if you have no clue
what either one
means.
###
I wished they could see
my mind, see that it was not
beautiful at all, but broken,
shriveled up. I wished they could see
my thoughts, jumbled
and discombobulated,
tossed
into complete and utter disarray.
I wished they could see
how very little sanity
I had left.
###
But they couldn't,
and so
I was lovely still.
###
My skin was beautiful, but
my mind was dying.
My mother never met me,
but she was right on target,
for like the winter,
I am stunning and still.
A/N: Hope you enjoyed! Please review!