Girls Who Kill Themselves

 

Girls who kill themselves

have a small mirror hidden in their locker.

It looks like a cheap, store-bought reflector,

but in actuality, it is a shard from the jealous Queen’s

broken looking-glass,

and it does nothing but cry.

For its truth is subjective,

a fact only understood with the aid of maturity

and time.

But girls who kill themselves

move fast like the wind.

They are the wild Mustang horses

which sometimes get caught and killed,

who don’t recognize freedom,

until it is lost.

It is never right for such creatures

to have hollowed out eyes,

because even though the mirror cries,

the eyes only see what the beaten queen believed

before she devised a plan to get off her knees.

Girls who kill themselves

see Sleeping Beauty’s punishment

as actually being the dream.



© Coleen T. Houlihan

 
Published in Spoonful: A Gathering of Stone Soup Poets November 2007