She has felt rage
the type that chars your guts
and leaves you bleeding
out your own eyeballs.
She has felt the explosion
of shrapnel
and the pain
from rogue shards
splintered between her bones and skin.
She knew of her orphaned dead,
speaking to their restless ghosts
till delirious
she lay next to them, near death,
in an effort to restore them to life
at the expense
of her own.
But that is not a rage
that climbs mountains,
it taught her only
how to cry tears of ash
in toxic blends of anger and acid
till asphyxiated.
Now
she leaves love notes
to her suffering,
marking the deaths
of all the possible happily-ever-afters
without a magical cure,
and with sharpened incisors
tipped in righteous furie,
she is released
to her once-upon-a-time.
Roz is a feminist poet and spoken word performer from the North of England who began writing in 2017 and performing in 2018. She has been published in Catalogue of Failure, Dear Damsels, Whisper and the Roar, Morality Park, as well as the poetry anthologies 'Further Within Darkness and Light' (published by Nothing Books) and ‘Essential Existentialism’ (published by CTU Publishing Group). In summer 2018 her pieces were displayed and performed at the London multimedia exhibitions 'The Sunlight Project' and 'Testimony.'