Call me Aphrodite.
Encase my soul with sea salt as if it were fine marble.
Hand me gold to fill in the cracks of my demeanor, silence my flaws.
Hang the doubts that assault my head like steel string over a cheater’s wedding
bed.
It’s often said you are your own worst critic, yet mine can’t seem to stay
hidden.
Forbidden to give anything less until I move on to the next goal in a race I didn’t
know anyone was winning.
Quitting became an old friend to flirt with, unbidden and emboldened while my
mind is rolling through what I used to be.
Call me Aphrodite.
Hand me pearls in place of prayer beads.
As I mourn the child I used to be, the one fixed on the TV.
Hungry for literature’s history, filling that empty living room with journal pages
like an after-school activity.
Encase my soul in sea salt.
So some unnerved part of me could believe that my potential did not die in
puberty.
Promise me that the nine-year-old girl I used to be, is still carefree in the cracked
red brick and worn playground concrete burnt into my memory.
Where you met me, hold my passions dearly, I plead.
Call me Aphrodite.
Let me be reborn in the sea with a beauty only seen in words forged by me.
Admire them wholeheartedly so I could fix the hole in my chest; Be better than
the rest, it seems to scream.
Doubts that feed, yet never cease pouring over every piece.
The least of my expectations is perfection.
Without correction, anything less and I feel as hated as Helen of Troy, a mere toy to a
petty goddess
Lost in the comparison, doubts set in.
Hanging heavy like steel string through the sting, I merely ask a single thing.
Call me Aphrodite and rebuild me with the beauty I can not see yet wish to be.
Jasmine is an nineteen-year-old newly graduated author based in Canada, taking a gap year to focus on her publishing career. Jasmine has had her work published twice in Polar Expressions anthologies, and has attended many Sage Hill youth workshops. Outside of her writing, she enjoys storytelling of all kinds, whether that be screenplays, theater, and the many flavors of prose or nonfiction.