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_