Sweet little girl no longer-
Too many screaming matched witnessed
Between the two people she believed in most
Too many accusations made about
The bunch of us
And the two of them
Speculations about abuse at the hands
Of our stepfather
Who our father believes is just
Our mother’s live-in boyfriend
A ten-year-old girl crying
Over the grown-up things
Our father says about our stepfather
The infamous line
“You should watch what you wear”
Said when she was lounging around the house
In her pajamas-
Short- shorts and a baggy T-shirt-
The summer she was fifteen
The things said to her
By a guy last spring
Who expected her to be his girlfriend
And to f*** him
The fact that most words out of her mouth
Are curses
Silenced only around her teachers and family
The way she can casually
Talk and joke about sex with her friends
As if it meant nothing
As if it couldn’t change everything
The math and Italian homework she sometimes
Refuses to do
The tests in math she never bothers
To study for
Knowing she’ll walk away with an awful grade anyway
The way she’s sliced open her skin
A handful of times
To silence the thoughts running wild
In her head
The way she’s fantasized about
Getting tipsy with her closest friends
Or even getting high
Even though she knows the risks involved-
She’d do it all just for the chance to forget
Just how unlovable she feels
Only emphasized by the fact that almost all
Of her friends have boyfriends
Yet there she sits
On the sidelines like always
With no one to call her own
No one to act silly with
Or wrap his arms around her
And hold her close to him
During those nights everything seems
IMPOSSIBLE
No one to kiss her or whisper
Sweet words to
No one to help her forget
Some of her harsher realities
No one to be real to
Confess all of this-
Every single word-
No judgment.

All of this-
Yet she’s still called
“Baby girl”
By her father
At seventeen.