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Caroline Morris is a poet and author who hails from Philadelphia but has found a new physical and literary home in Dublin as she gets her M.Phil in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. Her work wrestles with femininity, internal and interpersonal relationships, and what it means to have a body. Morris has previously been published by The Martello Journal, Green Ink Poetry, The Hyacinth Review, Beaver Magazine, and Vermilion, with two honorable mentions for the O’Hagan Poetry Prize.
What confidence I had in my young body,
What true shock I felt when my adolescent, potbellied frame
Could not outrun a car,
Pounding gravel with everything I had and it not being
Enough,
And still next morning, teaching my bus stop companions
How to strut,
Sure that the runway would hire me,
Ignore my height for my pink-and-turquoise braced smile,
But I was not wrong to believe,
For even after the braces peeled off,
And all of that confidence too was scraped away,
When the end times of girlish innocence and certainty came —
No one loves me —
My aching, little-big body continued to breathe.
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