The Art of the Unloved Child

i will meet you on the soiled floor with splintered knees and pointless pinkie promises, bearing the gruesome girth of your loveless little lies / forever fighting to quench my thirst, but your roots will always remain sodden / they say the apple never falls far from the tree but i was only a fig / in my wildest dreams, perhaps, i would become a figment of your apple tree / in a twisted reality i’d be the apple of your eye, instead of the forgotten fruit i had become / un-sprawling myself from underneath you like a wretched abnormality / as useless to you as the sugar coated illusions of your past / if only i was spared the sweet, honeyed coat instead of the raw, intimate center / i’d press my head against your heart sometimes anticipating a beat but i must have been deaf, or maybe i was exposed to screams too young / in another world, where i wasn’t a blood forged fig, and everything wasn’t forever my fault, and fear was only a fable, i’d elucidate to you this fact again and again / sugar and salt would never be one and the same / even if stemmed from similar families with identical bodies and an s to their names / one would never know sweetness, one would never be savored: one would never be loved—

Rebekah

ON

15 years old