Natalee Marini (19)
excoriation
i have never known
my hands to be pretty.
hangnails like errant roots from
cuticles erupt, peeled back
(slivered and raw)
like dry strips of bloody earth (feel: the sore-red ache of inflammation grown too familiar)
(see: dead-white stalks of skin, stiff as bodies in a morgue)
(taste: new blood, sluggish as it dries on torn-up nail-beds)
(touch: and dredge with jagged nails gashes scabbed over)
(think: i don’t know how to stop—
and wish
each morning
i might grow back someone else’s skin.
Natalee Marini is an undergrad at UMass Amherst. She is studying English and Education with the hope of becoming a high school English teacher someday. This poem has been previously published in UMass’s undergraduate literary magazine Jabberwocky.
excoriation
i have never known
my hands to be pretty.
hangnails like errant roots from
cuticles erupt, peeled back
(slivered and raw)
like dry strips of bloody earth (feel: the sore-red ache of inflammation grown too familiar)
(see: dead-white stalks of skin, stiff as bodies in a morgue)
(taste: new blood, sluggish as it dries on torn-up nail-beds)
(touch: and dredge with jagged nails gashes scabbed over)
(think: i don’t know how to stop—
and wish
each morning
i might grow back someone else’s skin.
Natalee Marini is an undergrad at UMass Amherst. She is studying English and Education with the hope of becoming a high school English teacher someday. This poem has been previously published in UMass’s undergraduate literary magazine Jabberwocky.