Shoulders back,
chin up high,
I'm trying to look normal,
but this ID tells a lie,
and it is making me look
like a criminal.

This photo is ideal
with a serial number
on a mugger's profile,
on a database all alone.
My identity is distilled to this:
a stranger with a face of stone.

The camera captured everything
except my personality,
my smile, my kind eyes
and what makes me, me.
As my face became a moment,
falsified for bureaucracy.

©️Lizzie Bevis

The moon listens,
to the ocean's sigh,
both distant,
yet eternally destined.

the day I lose feeling
will not come softly.

it will arrive in a hush—
not a peaceful one,
but the kind that devours echoes
and drapes the bones in frost.

I will no longer know the sting
of sunburned sorrow,
nor the hush of a warm hand
brushing the tears off my cheek.

no more trembling
under a thunder-skied guilt,
no more gasping at poems
that bleed with someone else’s grief—
I will be blank.

a shell left in the wake of a tide,
where even the salt forgets
the memory of waves.

how cruel,
to be untouched by ache or awe.
to no longer cry
at the sight of spilled light
on cold pavement at dusk—
to not care
how a crow calls at dusk
with a voice like cracked obsidian.

when I can no longer feel,
do not call it numb.
call it death.
call it
gone.

and when you find my name
beneath dust
in a book no one reads anymore,
know that once,
I was fire.
and it took the whole night sky
to put me out.