MAGDALENA BONE
Commended - 2024 Tower Poetry Competition, 'Mirror'
9:12am
Class has since started and there are
six girls crowding the sink and staring
eyebrows scraping ceiling stains as she scribbles
black into her eyes and she
paints her words in pink and she
kisses the mirror into apostasy’s colour.
When she returns to her maths lesson she will learn
how to solve exponential equations.
But it is here under lurid fluorescence where she discovers
another’s singular dimple and
how she has felt very little
since the night she called her brother 24 times
and her hands were swallowed by relief
upon hearing his sobbing.
She is offered gum;
it tastes like ammonia
and the walls smell like growth
and the girls smile like Womanhood.
There’s blood next to the bin, but not in violence—
in the solicitous hands that brush her face and
twist her hair and cradle
the overwhelming scent of Strawberry Kiwi that coughs and curdles
her lipstick stains on the glass.