Next | Survival

By Mandy Rose

Next

First the toes seize up. We triple in size. Cower behind our blue ox. We fasten our fingers over

our mouths so that they may not find us by our breathing. And then, nearly purple, we learn to

unfurl. What feathers we shake free! What dazzling plumes we discover when we let them pull 

us apart. Sweet when split open, like clementines. This is a custom that spins and spins and spins 

on itself. Unbalances us. When the days crumple into the toes of our sneakers. We shiver in our threads, not knowing what wings gleam against them. When the tops of our heads brush the 

beams of our next lives. We hurt, we hurt because we are growing.

Survival

Dawn ascends over trembling seas. Release, release the haunted syllables you used to sing to 

yourself in sleep. You, creature, are both velvet and jagged. You wear the ragged tenderness of

sea glass. You once cried out from wizened airways twenty fathoms deep. Shriveled and weak

and quite alone. But now your gills strike gold. To tell. To speak. Don’t you know the stories

sailors told? They heard your songs of self-protection, trilled in perilous octaves, green and blue.

They could not love what they could not tame, 

and they grew scared of you.

Your lungs are sirens only for your sake.

So,

Hold onto voice that pierces human ears.

It is your blade against the hands that take.

Mandy Rose is a queer Language Arts/ Literacy Educator and lyricist. She is passionate about her work in words- particularly, in expanding literary cannons to include stories that have been stifled. Her writing speaks to the experiences of young womxn in the process of unlearning harmful teachings about what they are allowed to feel and who they are allowed to love. IG: https://www.instagram.com/mandyrose.art