Ribcage Girl
She’s a ribcage girl
invisible tattoos of too many traumas
along her arms
as they turn her like a top in
an open field.
Bandaged muscle memory between skin and bone
untrue until she speaks them real.
She’s the survivor kind—
the mad, kind, crazy Fae
who see and speak the world from
under blue grey clouds,
sewn from pine tree heights.
She’s the runner kind,
who kept a life within her lungs
when bleeding fled, dead
into the pink sky and
turned it into
rise.
She’s a sandstone forever
bubbling project from kid shaped hands
vinegar grins and salt smeared
shores
baking soda white teeth marks
on the neck of the moon.
She’s a scarlet light at sundown
and an unexpected star
waiting, vengeful angel full of
too much pride,
and too much understanding,
and maybe too much forgiving.
She drowned, you see,
two times in the night.
Once under red waves with
golden foam and pretty promises
that trotted into thin lines of broken
ink along her ribcage.
And the second when she dove into
a green sea depth to breathe
out the blood and kiss the lady
of the lake.
Now she’s got a sword,
but she’s not the wielding type—
and in her second dying
she turned her eyes over and
her heart out
and drove her foot into the earth
and came up with a walking stick
and balance.
But no pain.
Name still splayed across her
silver skin on fresh-knit bone—
She’s an elastic kind of girl
a wonder of the world
a goodbad gray eclipse
between an age-old lesson learned
and a whisp of future flight.