Do me a favor
and color in my lines –
between my ribs,
my heaving chest,
my flushed cheeks.

Keep my mouth sharp,
my words precise and meaningful.

Add a bit of character to my
picked over hands.

Tickle my sides with
Prismacolor
or Crayola
and pinch my body pink with joy.

Color in my lines
and make me everything I want to be.

Add definition with thick black lines,
to give me structure
when I am falling apart.

Make something of this empty outline.

Bring out the beauty that I want it to hold.

It’s ironic, huh? How when the small of your back is pressing into beige carpeting with those nail polish stains from that one experiment in the eighth grade, your rib cage suffocating you as your lungs expand like a party balloon animal, that that’s when you are your strongest? Your fingertips are cold and blue, your cheeks flaming as if you had tried to stick the sun under your tongue, but all the while you only feel a slight warmth coursing through your veins and a pleasant breeze on your thighs. Shrapnel and pieces of broken stucco plant themselves in your forehead, tilted up towards the crumbling cerulean ceiling, but it only feels like the light sprinkling of rain you used to try to gulp down for refreshment. It is ironic that when you falter, you lift your shoulders a bit taller. You feel like you are falling apart, limbs numb yet pricked and prodded as the whole world’s pincushion, but you are being rebuilt out of marble. When your mind’s scaffolding is collapsing, your face still keeps that slight smile in the corner of your mouth stained with berry lip shade. Everyone admires your genuine smile while you know that it was carved by Donatello himself, your torment hidden behind layers of compacted stone.