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A small needful fact
Is that 98% of women
Do not look like fashion models.
100% of American children
Are being lied to everyday
Told they are not normal
Told there is something wrong with them.
Another needful fact:
More than two million women
More than eight hundred thousand men
Are bulimic
Add, subtract, multiply, divide
Any way you try to solve the problem
It still exists like a parasite.
If any girl, boy, child, man, woman
Wants to escape these images
Running with cupped ears in the other direction
Hoping to save themselves
It follows them, rank with the smell of sewage
It is the ghost in the closet
Television set
Store aisle
Telling them they are not good enough
They cannot escape the lies so dense
Even their inner most breath
Is hot with deception
And so, even the most basic function of breathing
Becomes challenging.
Until we replace poison with water
Brokenness with holiness
Lies with truthfulness
These seemingly sorrowful statistics
Will never quite add up.
A special thanks to Ross Gay for his poem "A Small Needful Fact" and to Megan Falley for using it as a prompt.
 Apr 2015 Leahsa Blake
Corina
We keep pretending making tea
like children with a playset
we keep pretending we are real
enough to drink and taste

We keep pretending we're in touch
like we have a real connection
we keep pretending we're not strangers
and we never even met
 Apr 2015 Leahsa Blake
josin137
The sun is setting,
The painted sky,
All I see is black lighting,
Which makes me cry.

The silence that kills,
My heart collides,
The fire drills,
All those painful rides.

The drips and drops,
Like on a rainy night,
A rabbit hops,
I see no light.

Dreading myself,
In endless sorrow,
In mindless shelfs,
The screaming crow.

And now it's the end,
Of this painful book,
Memories end,
My heart shook.

*... I feel hopeless ...
i feel stabs but there's no wound
when i first met you i was shy and still wore
pink and had an uncanny obsession with
sweaters and you had smiled at me so warmly that
i couldn't help but have smiled back because
you looked so happy
//
when i first realized i was in love with you it was
a warm july sun and a humid air and you were
laughing as i rambled on about a book
that i can't remember the title of but
god, i had never thought that people could look beautiful
under the horizon because the sky was too distracting
but on that particular day, i'm sure the horizon was jealous
of how light your hazel eyes looked and how deep your dimples were
i laid awake that night, thinking about your smile
and how happy it made me, and how terribly bittersweet
this was going to be
//
when i look at you know, i do not see the sun-kissed
boy with laughter in his eyes and a permanent smile on
his cheeks, i see a shadow of the boy i used to love and
sometimes i wonder if i should care at all that you're sad, because
you never seem to care when i am, though i suppose that is what
love is itself, loving somebody so unconditionally that
even when they laugh and mock you, you would still cry with them
the very next day
//
although then again, i'm sure you don't know what love is
this is very bad. and raw. and unedited and the start of a series of poems where the title is a lyric in a song, this one is I Miss You by blink 182
 Apr 2015 Leahsa Blake
erin
when you lean down your eyes toward me
I can hear the whisperings of the universe
and when you swing down your arms toward me
I'm lifted into the wilderness
because your lips are wild
and they ravage
me
you found me fishing for ligaments
or maybe something to join my soul to my body
like another supplement
to feed my psyche

secretly
I'm waiting for day break
and the day you take
me
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