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Flowery Wasteland

Mind is blue, tattooed with floral etchings.
Copper wire rib cage, coiled around bone.
Dust and sunlight on the wall,
seems you were never quite as tall.
Veins trace through eternity, roots of wildflowers an ever-tangled mess
reaching towards fingertips that have never been able to graze the golden-feathered cattails
and little stories of the times you’ve hung onto every wretched word of one
while the other grasps onto everything you didn’t mean to give him.
Eyes light up when moon beams penetrate your very blood,
casting it to silver.
You beg her to tell you the past is only a wasteland,
yet this past is where you left all your sketches of his face at different angles,
the way you tried to draw his good side but his heart bled through the pages,
blotting out your perception of the way one talked at lengths about your soul
that seemed to swim in the pools of your eyes.
One tells you that your existence displeases her
while the other can’t stand the thought of your life being something like a flowery wasteland,
something that sets the heart aflutter when the storm begins to glow and tear
because she wanted to watch me experience something she never had
and it hurts so bad
the way she tries to just forget about it
when he locks himself in the dark room they were supposed to share.
Between the blackness under his door
and the kites with dragons’ tails that are destroyed in the storms,
still my ghosts come to comfort me when the winds kick up,
and we watch the dragon-like kite fold in on itself and crumple to the dust of this wasteland.
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Melanie Fino is a third year English and Creative Writing student at Shepherd University. She has previously been published in Shepherd University’s literary magazine and won a Young Writers Contest in West Virginia. She intends to pursue a career in writing after graduation.

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