Page 286 - E-Magazine 2016-17

SHE WHO BURNED

BRIGHTER THAN ANY SUN

She’s soft like dandelions and beautiful like a thousand tiny fireflies among rose bushes

You try to picture her face in your mind but it
always blurs and contorts and perhaps that
loveliness is impossible to redraw

She calls you up at two a.m., sobbing and you
wonder if the tornado in her head finally
knocked her off balance
“Angels can’t fly if their wings are clipped off.
Angels can’t fly if they never knew what it was
like to have wings”

She draws herself in sharp lines and angles,
and you wish so desperately to make her some-
how see that she wasn’t knife points, she was a
lavender field

“How much longer should the sun shine until
it burns out the fire in its core?”
Something about her makes you feel like lay-
ing down your life to protect her

She’s always the candle, feeding everyone’s flame and she’s always blaming herself for
melting

Sticks and stones fail to break her bones but the words tear her heart from inside

You want to smoothen out the charcoal of her eyes and draw her soft and lovely
She always stands for people who won’t even stand up for her

You want to draw her blue skies and cotton candy hearts and butterflies and drive her
across the country

She with her poetry that sounds so much like a prayer, that sounds like a funeral march
You can taste the sadness in everything she does, metallic and awful

She lights up every room she steps in
She with the eyes that twinkle like fireflies

She with eyes that hold the magnitude of a black hole

She, Elysian.

She, ethereal YASHASWINI XI-B
She, eternal.