Islands

To the little girl who knows she will never be young again,

Every woman I know is an island.
It will be summer and you will be twelve,
and you will be camping on your friend’s rooftop,
and everyone’s sleeping when her father
makes his way into the tent. You will make
a deliberate attempt to forget where his hands touched.
You will write so many poems about open ribcages,
violent deaths; anything to make you feel
like you inhabit your body. Something was robbed
of you that night and you haven’t been to a sleepover since.
At every touch, you say to yourself,
there’s a war to be won.
And you don’t feel like you own your body.
Something was robbed of you and you keep
saying no because you didn’t say no that one time.
Every woman I know was a little girl
who knew she would never be young again.

Every woman I know is an island.
A peak submerged till she is craning her neck for breath.
Distant.

By Amogha Lakshmi Halepuram Sridhar

Biography:

Amogha Lakshmi Halepuram Sridhar is a writer from India. She wrote for the Times of India as a student correspondent and she is currently an art editor at The Missing Slate. She can be found on Twitter @shakspaere.