wicked alice| fall 2011

Sarah Neal

Fourteen: you did it to yourself

Unstick your thighs. Plug the hole

with gum. Remember

the pierce, the safety

pin—tip burned. How you

pushed in, through a second

of skin: hours. Pasthips

electrified. Sheets pink

from the bellymouth. Fade

the walls make talk. Hot-toast-

pricks fill your ears. Speak them

silver you lighter you

flirt, you thigh.

Once corded, now

hooked: your swollen:

buttonlip: your beaded chump.

What on Earth: the shortest autobiography

Many times they said to the child, No god in your house. No God in your house. She stared at her hands, saw in them trees. Becoming clumsy, she’d fall, walk into jagged.

A day she began to bleed. Realized rivers. Let rafts empty her, into Ocean.

Then. What on Earth they taught her became holy: it softened. She’d visit, find arrowheads, pray.

She found brokens

just inside the door/ Brokens once whole

once taken by the ear/ Lips placed there to drink

now lies in teeth pieces/ On both knees

she slides shards into her palmcup:

A hunked-off lip/ Thorny slivers / Grainy bits

she drags across tile

An anthill powder she presses its fine

into her finger’s oily tip

Sarah Neal is currently working on her MFA in Poetry Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, .She lives in Yonkers with her dog, Sylvia, and two cats, Mama Cass and Chloe.