Sage Walton (18)

the storm
Honorable Mention in the Ribs Contest

i find myself in the office
of a doctor who promises
he can make me happy again
but what he doesn’t realize is that
i am not asking him
to fix me

because that sounds too much like a plea
and pleas sound too much like
the kind of desperate deals
where you’re selling your soul
to the devil

i don’t dance with devils.

(especially ones in white coats)

i would rather thunder through cages
and break down walls
than face the disaster in my head

so i stay silent.

he doesn’t flinch at my silence
i am radioactive
i am explosive
and i don’t know how to be anything
but terrified of the image
i have become

still, i don’t say anything.

i would rather tear my home to pieces
than try to find sanity
in an office that reeks of
antiseptic and broken hearts
but i don’t think that he sees that
i don’t think he understands

when i was young
my mother told me that
these hands are made to create
but these hands haven’t created anything
they only know how to destroy

i try to tell him how
cages terrify me
(how this feels like one)
that i can feel the cage inside me
throbbing
how i’m terrified of my
ribs puncturing the soft tissue
of my broken heart

i’ll tear open this cage
before that happens.

mothers are made to protect
but how their arms become cages
how i felt trapped in
a perfect image that was
never mine

and how i’m punished by
the way her face turns to sand
washed away with the tide
i have lost her

there is no remedy for the way
our ribs crack and mouths bleed
there is no remedy for a mother
who doesn’t love you
but only loves who you should be

there is no remedy for a mother
who has bred a perfect storm.



Sage Walton is eighteen and will be graduating from high school this May. ​