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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Contrapposto

By Audrey Lee

 

I have bones to pick with existence –

who forced me to be here as a vulture,

coughing up marrow of my personality’s frame?

 

Who poised my skeleton in material decay

to walk among the inhabitable

 

spaces while my hands are raised in the air

in prayer or self defense –

there’s a pale girl who isn’t sure which

 

one she should be asking more of.

There’s a bird who is picking away

 

at the scoliosis in my spine, the serotonin

(or lack thereof) in the palpable scars

 

gasping across the folds of my frontal cortex, how about

my nervous system backfiring

 

like a space shuttle that ran out of fuel.

There’s empty music from the empty room across the hall

 

that roars and reminds me.

I kick at a speck of dust

 

because it is licking at the fireplace and I watch it

burst in the heat and sink into the flames.

 

 

Audrey Lee is a current senior at The Episcopal Academy in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania and will be attending Franklin and Marshall College this coming fall. She is the winner of the 2016 DeSales University Poetry Contest and her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and Columbia College of Chicago. She has attended programs by the University of Virginia and Ithaca College, and edits her school literary magazine, The Epolitan. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Claremont Review, Rookie Magazine, YARN: The Young Adult Review Network, Canvas Literary Journal, Moledro Magazine, Blue Marble Review, Eunoia Review, Half Mystic Journal, Paper Swans Press, and Teen Vogue. This summer, Audrey will attend the University of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and intern at Apiary Magazine. Find her at audreymorganlee.weebly.com.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Issue Six

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