Heaving breaths shudder in your chest,
fireflies erupt in the base of your throat.
Pupils expand and blood trickles slowly from your face,
leaving you translucent.
A ghost, raise a toast,
to the girl in the woods.
Shaking in the fire-hot snow as it presses into your palms.
As you collapse, knees buckling and clanking like chains against an iron fence,
against the invisible, impenetrable distance surrounding you.
Hair cascades down the sides of your face,
a velvet curtain, drinking in the light from the hazy sun.
Snapshots flash and shatter in the pools of your irises,
contorting the cupid-bow of your lips.
The white-knuckle of your carved out hands,
fisting the dead grass beneath the snow.
Moments pass,
and you shudder, shoulders rising and falling like swollen waves.
Until you decide,
And something brittle takes ahold of you,
and the hole carved into your chest is barricaded with wood.
Abruptly pulling fingertips from the stretch of the ground,
as a sharp hiss of wind slices your tongue from your mouth.
Silent screams (among a multitude of things)
escape the hard-compressed diamond of your heart.
You examine your hands,
of the bloody nails born from scraping against the frozen floor,
the burgeoning rosiness of your skin,
and the way you can't seem to feel them.
Unbidden, a smile curls onto your face
(all sharp teeth and harsh angles)
and you let out a bitter laugh.
Blurred thoughts, murky in the blinding light, claw themselves to the surface,
to the burning recesses of your mind.
The crumbling exterior, futile grasp to stay the same forever,
a fragile piece, like glass buried deep inside of your chest
has cracked.
Three scores, an undetectable knife scraped along the outline of a womb,
At the turbulent chaos held inside of you.
Plucked out from a half-savage spirit;
hope.
Like placing gauze to staunch the bleeding, you reach out and
grab at all the jagged pieces, twisting them,
forcing them together until the cracks are indiscernible.
You rise from the snowflake-like ashes,
And tilt your chin to balance sky.
Girl of straw-delicate nature, easy to break and burn,
spun herself into blistering-bright gold.
Feral and polished
you stake your claim on yourself,
on the sweltering storm inside of you
and freeze it.
You taste the sweetness of the coppery-blood on your tongue
ad you bite down, pain grounding the dizzy expanse,
and your lips twist into a thin line.
You straighten your shoulders and close your eyes,
letting the lightning cripple inside of you.
Sunshine girl in her star-struck world
makes herself a promise
to never be convinced again.
Raise a toast to the girl in the woods,
to the ghost hidden in the back of her mind.
Raise a toast to the little girls,
to the hardening of their hearts as they grow.
to each score on their souls,
To the thunder that comes out of the chasm and cold.
Raise a toast
to each torn out, ravaged love.
Raise a toast
to a bittersweet beginning,
to a damaged start,
to all those who wield a stitched-together heart.