ugly duckling by Katie Tian (15, New York)

[content warning: toxic relationships, substance abuse]

in the backseat of a stranger’s 
honda, the cigarette stain on my wrist still shines
like alabaster. i am laced into 
my white dress from junior prom, but i have
a feeling we graduated years ago. 

---

by midnight we are ambitions 
in freefall, bone-picking crows in virginia
mid-winter, not swans sunk 
in the lake. the bomb-black of your tuxedo
has faded to gray. 

the plans we made to break 
of this glassy-eyed town, before 
the engine was overrun by moss & spring.
 don’t know much, but this i know: 

i’ve written my will. etched it into the walls
of a sequoia & sealed it with a sailer’s kiss.
left what little i have to you. 

we still call ourselves lucky, but i can’t see
clearly through the fog in my brain. they say
play pretty, not dead— 

like how romantic. how romanticized. as if
we are not shells. as if reinvention 
is not hollowed limbs & honeyed 
tongues & i haven’t tasted for half a decade. 

but i taste metallic when i bleed. cyclic--
there is a blade & a carton of eggs past
sell-by date in the trunk. i slash a tire 
for every extra day in purgatory & 
set the sidewalk for a picnic. 

i won’t tell you anything because the moon
is sickle-shaped over an empty 
parking lot & you still gaze at all the pretty virgin
girls in the magazines. we don’t care 
that our world is a wasteland.
your artificiality sticky 
as candyfloss on my bare skin. my desperation
saccharine-sweet like morphine. 

the cheap alcohol on your breath 
spills over me like the contents of 
a stoppered vial, all the things we could have been. 

play pretty, but they only care 
when you’re dead. the engine is clean 
now—but we haven’t been for days. 

in a few centuries, an archaeologist or maybe
a schoolgirl will find my cranium eroded in a
bone-beaten alley, copper 
& soot picked clean by crows, the ghosts
of your fingerprints ribboning my throat. 

i will be splayed on the turrets 
of your white-picket-fence 
fantasies—into infinity, the ugly duckling
that never turned into a swan.