Poem by Coleen T. Houlihan

Illustration by James Conant



Girls Who Kill Themselves

Girls who kill themselves
have a small mirror hidden in their locker.
It looks like a cheap, store-bought reflector,
but in actuality it is a shard from the jealous Queen’s
broken looking-glass,
and it does nothing but cry.
For its truth is subjective,
a fact only understood with the aid of maturity
and time.
But girls who kill themselves
move fast like the wind.
They are the wild Mustang horses
which sometimes get caught and killed,
who don’t recognize freedom
until it is lost.
It is never right for such creatures
to have hollowed out eyes
because even though the mirror cries,
the eyes only see what the beaten queen believed
before she devised a plan to get off her knees.
Girls who kill themselves
see Sleeping Beauty’s punishment
as actually being the dream.