To Forget & Not Forget in a Bathtub by Danae Younge

It has been seventy-three years 
& she must swallow night, now, like her caplets,
when daylight is a dearth inside her peeling stomach. 
The days are nameless & dirtied, those

that secrete from her skin come nightfall — 
that she feels dust her creases mauve 
& defuse through turbid water — 
her throat takes them back through steam 
pasting moon crescents to the tiles. 

She inherits a shadow for a body like the strings 
& figures swaying gray while pinned to the walls. 
She does not wish to turn on the light  

when monochrome is the only scene that loiters:
sound & color compressed, clinging silence to her bones — 
these moments gelatinous sustenance inside her skull —
it’s true, beams of light only shape shift & slither decades 
through her ghost, shed scales, parched and brittle. 

Cadences float like velvet lilies, dispersed, 
brush asylum occasionally against her nakedness 
as she steeps in the murky substance — 
in all the faceless men who have ever harmed her.

Danae Younge is a 19-year-old writer who attends Occidental College in the States. Her work has been internationally recognized, and is published/forthcoming in Pulp Poets Press, Susquehanna Review, Nonconformist Magazine, The Curator, and others. She was a national winner selected by the Live Poets Society of New Jersey and placed third in the international It’s All Write competition for high schoolers.

Website: www.danaeyounge.com

Instagram: @danae_celeste_