irises as black as her pupils, an atlas of red veins in the whites of her eyes;
she never gets enough sleep.
she doesn’t like her dreams.

jagged cuts lacing through her swollen lips;
she tears the skin off of them when she’s nervous, leaves thin white papery shafts of skin in her wake like deadened glitter.
she’s always nervous.
she’s always been told her mouth is prettiest, a celebrity mouth, they call it, why is she destroying it?
she says it’s a metaphor.

a long, round nose that turns askew at the bridge, lost in the plains of her face;
it didn’t used to be crooked.
she got hit in the face by a football when she was nine.
she had to stop playing when the boys hit puberty, and couldn’t tackle her anymore.
she thinks, that’s when it would have started to get fun.

pale skinny weeds for arms, porcelain wrists, calloused hands, hardened biceps;
the wrists are her grandmother’s. she is pale and dark everywhere except her storm-colored veins.
the hands are vibrato-wrought violinist’s and a midnight hand-writer’s.
she’d like to say the biceps are, as well, but those are forged from salty sweat in a dingy boxing gym.
nobody really knows her name, but they know her face because she’s combination lefty, girl, and tirelessly abusive to the punching bags.

that one place on her arm she thought would scar;
it was slit by a thorn in the golan heights.
they’d lost her brother for more than an hour.
she swam up to her waist in frigid rapids.
she stopped fighting against the current.

an arbitrary mirage in the desert of her chest;
underneath the vast and aching cavity, there is a hole in her heart.
the doctors thought they would have to sew it up. instead, a membrane covers it.
she massages it surreptitiously. sometimes she counts her heartbeats.
it is invisible to the eye, but you can hear it with a stethoscope.

tiger-striped ivory against lilac, phantom cicatrices along her breasts;
she started developing when she was eight. she never stopped.
she always hated them, until she played a tennessee williams bombshell onstage.
she had to get undressed in front of the entire school.
it was the only role she’s never been told she “looked wrong” for.
she thinks the stretch marks look a little like battle scars.

the slight bulge at the bottom of her stomach;
if she could pinch it off, she would have done so a thousand times over.
she doubts it will ever be flat.
it doesn’t cause her so much anxiety as it did in middle school.
still, when people ask her, why don’t you want to be an actress? it comes to mind.

her mind;
she’s obsessive compulsive interrupted by vivid daydream.
she is a goody-two-shoes perfectionist who worries more than she sleeps
yet she finds time to wonder what an author might describe her like in a book.
sometimes when she feels like a failure, she imagines being interviewed when she’s successful.
people like her have problems with organization, she’s told, so she makes lists instead of doing things.
she lists her flaws in a way that makes her seem beautiful to convince herself of it.