Jezona Rodriguez
My brain is a furnace that only burns rot,
A machine that chews beauty into ash and feeds the smoke back into my lungs
Until I choke on myself.
I am a cathedral made of broken glass,
Every prayer that enters me is cut to ribbons before it reaches heaven.
My body is a grave I was born into, skin stretched over bones like a coffin nailed shut too early.
My mind is a laboratory of mistakes,
A place where every thought is preserved in jars labeled
defect,
distortion,
disaster.
My veins feel like wires wrapped in rust, carrying signals that never reach the places that need healing.
My skin hovers uneasily over my bones like borrowed parchment,
Thin fragile, and always threatening to tear.
I stand in the mirror as if I am examining a specimen gone wrong—
A face misshapen by years of quiet self-hatred,
Features arranged like a puzzle with the wrong pieces pressed into a false harmony.
Beauty doesn’t live here.
It evaporated somewhere between the bruised confidence under my ribs and the reflection that refuses to meet my eyes.
People glance at me the way one glances at mold on a wall;
quickly, curiously, with a bitter trace of disgust they try to swallow.
I am a creature someone sketched hastily and forgot to finish,
A draft abandoned in the margins,
Left with uneven lines and accidental shadows.
And in the end, I am nothing more than an injured animal on the side of the road,
Not dead, just dissmised—cars rushing past, faces turned forward, no one stopping,
no one daring to look.
287 words
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