part of something and witness to it is to be

a plane in the sky, the pilot. To be a mother.

A child looking at the stars for the first time

thinking ‘I’m really beneath all this forfeit of

heaven.’

Or to be a teenage woman knowing heaven in

another woman is the only forfeit there is.

You watch. You look at the world thinking

there’s a way into it.                              Bullet

enters

cotton target, or at least you think it's cotton

until it bleeds.

To know why your blood is the kin type of your

best friend’s who runs low.

Why her wounds open like offering hands–

                                 as seas spreading graces and

‘save me’ and lip kiss reds

all over that have bandaids placed over them.

To create some kind of art at the worst points of

view

almost to express a presence of consequence

doing something about it.

                                            The active passing,

the air dancing in fists, voices, front teeth.

You wouldn’t know victory

just in the other room is a ten month old taking

its first steps as you’re understanding the terms

‘one after the other’

counting falling numbers.

Every reach

still in false prayer.

To pile in a grease trap of disclaimers, slowly

building newborn names once exiled.

What it means to be both at place and outsider

or to be this restatement

in a baggy shirt that surrounds the shrunken

body sinking into it.

You know the void so far you go blind trying to

find the sky but you’re still on the darker end of

things.

It means to be a window, or whatever they say

instead of mirror or shallow.

                   Bare, like a Bambi

before the scarce prey of youth, in the rising

sunlight of bullseye.

Yes, this one gets messy. But he lives.

Against all those sunday axes, still on your own

search for timber, it’s to persist in

the gnashes remaining in the struck treebark.

              A lesson of man’s moral threat, his hands

or the woodpecker’s favorite, cavity brown

bone.

To give both synthesis to a skeleton and to bury

it.

          The marrow carved weapons colliding,

welding a halt into one coincidental peace.

You find every afterward slice and shard of

sanctuary in shining crumbs of deep cuts,

knowing the moon had

given every piece of itself to be seen.

You wouldn’t understand these multitudes

until you've yearned that pale face, bone thin and

waning

right in front of you.

Lynsey is an eighteen year old writer/artist living in Kentucky where she runs her own online store based on her textile mediums.

Authors Notes: These pieces exhibit the shame that follows self-acceptance--the fact that we exist in ourselves, or that, when reflections face us, bare skin, bare flaw, raw, we can only look back and let that image sit, or sink, either with us, or beyond us. These pieces I wrote in trying to decide which.