an exercise in hyperbole

By Samantha Simon

12th grade

an exercise in hyperbole

saints and sinners and seagulls, Adam or Prometheus

prey for me

Your organs are yours, my organs are yours, pull my ribs out through my stomach, i deserve it

make a son somebody new, make him a sister who is only half a girl and half her own 

extend these breathing hands to someone who wants to take them out of eden and into the inferno

If i took a cleaver a big one for meat and apples and chopped off my hand i would be unhappy with the width of my wrist

these misshapen limbs these rectangle teeth were not made to be contained in this 

anybody’s empty vacuum bag with a windblown seam split spewing dust across the room so i’m sorry to spill my dirt on your floor

Maybe it’ll grow a garden.

We can water it with bone marrow and snake oil.

Everyone in the world should be more right for me. No, let’s all be perfect and delicate and break like blown glass the first time we slip out of grasp. Grow in my garden at the rate that I want you to. 

the electric surge to bite off my own elbow like a carrot in an avalanche

I am a billion tiny dancing snowflakes more fragile than you can ever imagine

but only in the corners where it counts and 

never where you can see me

I am the china and i am the china shop and i am the bull

I am also the dustpan under the shelf next to the brown jug of gasoline and i clean my own mess up for attention, like the lion and his ring of fire

well tracing the valleys of my ribs does nobody any good because who wants to color in such ugly lines? so 

who is it for me or you

something’s unfurling inside me im going in

like the strawberry squid from out past the asteroid belt

I wish I was more right for everyone in the world without an open-letter body for scrutiny. and i want to open each of the seven gates behind your eyes and walk down the garden path to find the clearing in the forest where you’ll have your shit figured out