She was ugly.
A snake of a girl- beady
blue eyes and
blood-red toenails.
The small snigger creeping
up through her perfectly
kept teeth as she spat
at the garbage
of the street: the creatures
she couldn’t see
through her beady
blue eyes.
Her mama would dress her
up in yellow ribbons and green bows.
“Why honey,
you make a sweet little
dandelion,”.
She liked to be
a dandelion, but secretly
she dreamed of being
a marigold:
Lips parted to the sun,
seeds planted
in the rich soil of her own
blackness.
She wanted to be a marigold.
But she was just
a dandelion,
stepping on petals and
weeding out whatever
she longed to be.
Inspired by Toni Morrison's eye-opening novel (pun not intended)
