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By Micah Fletcher

I have watched men and women

Take their skin with scissors

And cut it down the middle

Pulling it apart

Like a bad Halloween mask

I have watched men and women

Sit there and paint themselves

The color of whatever they want to be

Because they believed

That a tattoo that they were born with all over

Would stop them from being

whatever they believed was growing in them

Beautiful gut

I have watched men and women

Shatter mirrors and take the shards

And cut it open

watching their wrists

As a glass shard travels 28 centimeters

across somebody’s wrist

Just to find it is the end of the journey

All I have to say to you

And I mean you

Is I am so sorry

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

There are some days

When you can barely lift your wings

They are heavy and cold

Wet with the teardrops

That fall from that obscene fiery ball in the sky

And there are other days

When your veins are full of kerosene

Fingers open and closed

Because they are Zippos

And your lungs are billows blowing into a furnace

where a heart should be

A burning cathedral

Born on a Monday

In a one-way alley

And three men brutalized me

At the age of seven

I knew what the cement tasted like

And there are other days

You feel empty

The fires burn out

Your wings dry and you are left to curl up in a ball

Let your outer carapace camoflouge you

On a mountaintop

Cool…hard…and empty

As if the blue pills I take in the morning

Full of amphetamines

Are instead black holes in capsules

Sucking the emotions inside of me by their tassles

Until I am left undecorated

A house made homeless

Save its roof and front door

There’s another thing I’ve met

Both men and women

Who have suffered from

Men and women who are called whores

Houses with shattered windows

And crooked panes with cracked ceilings

And faded stains

They’re victimizers

Playing these panes on the colors

Of their welcome mats

Or on the signs on the front door that read

I AM WARM SO YOU CAN CALL ME HOME

I know that being jumped and being raped

Are not the same thing

Despite both sometimes being blamed

on the way that we dressed

But why

Is it that in some situations I am called a victim

And he or she that society has the audacity

to call from some broken home

That should have known better

Than to be built in such a bad neighborhood

Are we that fucking blind?

Are we stricken or guilty?

Why don’t we just sew our eyes shut

Because we’re too scared to admit

We don’t know how to stitch bedsheets back together

When they’ve been ripped form the seams

It seems we don’t know anymore

I mean after all

Where does prevention stop

And where does protection begin?

This poem won the Verslandia Poetry Slam in 2013 and you can see Micah performing it here.