he is blind when
you plan your day with
little numbered boxes
and bullet points,
when you braid your sister’s
hair and tie it
with a daisy chain
when the sunlight stains
your skin with an
unbearable
shade of pink and
sprayed little dots that
form hearts and stars on the
back of your neck.
he doesn’t know
that you always notice the repetition in poetry
that you prefer jazz music while
doing pushups
that you collect the teeth
that were too small for
your mouth when you were nine
that you put spiders on leaves and
take them outside the door
that you peel blades of grass until
they form perfect parallel lines
that you write with your left hand
only because
you want to be seen
that you can tell the difference between the G and the C
on the last row of a vision test
that you wear a different color
of the rainbow each day
for your gay friends that
don’t want your pity
that you cling to his arm because your
father’s was an iron fist
that your ribs ache from the hours
you spent on the floor last night
that you scrub yourself down thirteen times a day
for each time he touched you
that you sleep with a nightlight because
the dark stings your bloodstream
and your heart wants out of its cage
that you run to the store to get milk
not for mom but for a gamble
with your breath
whether it’ll decide to part ways
with you today.
that you’re another slab
of clay to get tangled in his fingers
stuck beneath his fingernails
for him to mold you
a faceless figure
he knows;
knowing, but still oblivious.
Venya Sharda is a junior at Washington High School in Northern California, who spends her free time writing poetry with The Writer’s Circle, peer editing English essays (which her peers procrastinate and leave it to her to fix little grammar mistakes), and bothering her cats, Mochi and Juno. She also enjoys watching pretentious Christopher Nolan films, math tutoring, and her guilty pleasure is solving unnecessarily complicated calculus problems.