by Nikita Gill
eat whatever happiness is left inside
and cause death and suicides,
destroy families and cause loss
using just words,
lies twisted into more lies.
We cannot hide from them,
cannot beat them back,
we cannot turn them into stories again,
we must face simple facts:
they now live amongst us
their bridges are burned and gone.
They wear armour made of code.
Still lacking hearts,
no songs in their souls
for them to truly hold.
We cannot protect our children
from these evil beings,
but we can teach them
how to protect themselves.
You see, the trolls may have
taken over the internet’s
highways and chatrooms
and Instagram, Twitter, Facebook,
but they have forgotten
something crucial
that humans know
all too well.
A monster is only a monster
if we allow it to live in our minds and swell.
So we teach our children now
that even though monsters exist,
the best way we can defeat them
is to never give them influence
over the way our minds make thoughts
or over what our hearts express.
Difficult Damsels
Not all girls are made of sugar
and spice and all things nice.
These are girls made of dark lace
and witchcraft and a little bit of vice.
These are daughters made claw first
and story-mad, tiger roar and wolf-bad.
These are women made of terrible tempests
and savage storms and the untamed unwanted.
These are damsels made of flawless fearlessness
made of more bravery than knights have ever seen.
These are princesses made of valour and poison alike
and they are here to hold court as your queens.
Hunger: The Darkest Fairytale
The difference between
Being thin and having an eating disorder
is that eating disorders know how to hide
in plain sight and stay hidden,
whereas being thin is conspicuous.
Thin is applauded, upheld
for adulation and praised as beautiful.
And if you smile and skip lunch again
no one is going to notice
the war inside your body yet.
People ask questions,
but no one asks the right questions.
Who knew ‘How are you so skinny?’
instead of ‘When was the last time you ate?’
could be the difference between
getting help and nearly dying.
You reconcile yourself with
not being able to sleep on your side
anymore because your hip bones
cut into your thin skin with ‘at least I am skinny.’
At some point you start making lists
called ‘reasons why I must eat’.
But still you keep falling backwards
whenever you see someone thinner than you
and the villain once again pierces your mind.
You remind yourself,
‘Hunger is not my friend.
Hunger is not making me stronger.
Hunger does not love me.’
A helpless chant as it rips through your brain.
At some point someone notices,
it’s usually a parent,
it’s predominantly a mother.
Finally someone understands
You are trying to kill yourself to look pretty.
This means hospital trips and therapy
and not looking into the mirror
to see monsters anymore.
But it also means seeing your mother cry.
Nothing can ever prepare you for that.
Your body asks you, ‘Why do you hate me?’
and you have no more answers to give it.
Only exhaustion and apologies.
Your body says, ‘Will you love me now?’
And you know recovery means saying ‘Yes.’
But the hunger … it is still there.
It sits inside you waiting.
Like a toxic relationship,
it informs you coolly
it is not going anywhere.
This is what it means to defeat
an eating disorder, you take out
a restraining order against it
but prepare yourself for the worst
by not relying on it.
And even when someone thinner
walks by, remind yourself
how beautiful you are
without feeding tubes
pumping food into your veins.
Recovery means actually
believing that your body
weight is your kindness
and your resilience and your talents
instead of numbers on a scale.
But recuperation means different things
to unalike people.
It means survival to some.
It means healing to others.
And to others still it just means alive.
Vengeance Born
Tell the woods and tell the fae,
tell every rough beast out today,
tell all things soft to fear dark,
to hide all good children
from the beckoning sparks.
Tell the wind and tell the trees
dangerous secrets are concealed
inside their leaves,
tell the witches to leave offerings
in the shape of prayer and bloodstones
but warn my enemies to hide their bones.
Tell them all what they tried to kill came back.
Tell them all that I have come home.
The Art of Emptiness
There is an art
in the emptiness
of all natural things.
Ask every creature
that builds hollow places
as a shelter from the weather.
They fill these spaces
with the fullness of their bodies
and for them this is enough.
Humans go against their own nature
and conflate empty with
dull and with lonely.
Fill up spaces that do not need filling,
anything to help us escape
boredom and its tragedy.
And this is why we fill
our children’s heads with stories
to combat the mundanity.
And so little girls end up
learning emptiness the hard way,
that the stories were castles in the air.
How true loves and princes
are really confused little boys
who haven’t yet learned how to care.
That sometimes you fall in love
with a princess instead of a prince
and that’s okay too.
Maybe this is why the stories
need to evolve from air
into fire instead.
From airborne fairytales
we can read them fiery-tales
when it’s time for bed.
The Moral of Your Story
This is how they lie to us:
Love, love so selflessly
that you change the world.
The truth is brutal:
if you care this way
the world will gut you mercilessly.
And harsher still:
all of this love you hold
is too selfless.
Yes, my dear,
too selfless exists no matter
how much they deny it.
&nb
sp; You see, you have been
taught to give too much
without wanting anything back.
What no one tells you
is this constant sacrifice
is designed to keep you pliant.
It is designed to keep you weak
and one day
it will devastate you.
And what good are you destroyed
to anyone, to anything,
especially to your own truth?
The Looking Glass
Mirrors know words.
They speak whole sentences.
‘Such a large nose, such terrible skin’
like a punishing voice from within.
‘Who will love you with all these scars?’
Age-old verses to tear you apart.
What you need to understand,
chainmail to solidify your heart,
is no polished metal understands how temporary
our skin, bones, and muscles actually are.
Remind yourself that there is more to you than
the flaws that scream from the looking glass.
Meet your reflection in the eyes that pronounce
your depth, ignore empty words, and stand tall.
Apologise to yourself for listening to abuse,
remind yourself that you are the fairest of them all.
The Giant’s Daughter
Teaching yourself to take up space
is like trying to love someone
who is violently resisting your love.
It is walking into a room
and trying not to make yourself scarce.
It is to be mindful of your own shrinking.
It is to become comfortable with
being uncomfortably aware that you,
like Houdini, have mastered the art
of escaping whilst being watched.
It is learning how not to do it
even when every bone in your body
has been taught to go into hiding.
Charming
If you want to know him,
watch his mouth.
Ignore the sea-god eyes.
Ignore the fullness of his laugh.
The air around him is a charade.
The only thing that cannot lie is his mouth.
Mouths are entrances to the soul-house inside.
And people who do not mean smiles
cannot send the joy back to
the empty room that is their eyes.
Your parents, your friends are all under his spell.
He is charm personified, compliments galore.
This is what bewitchment looks like,
they all defend him when he calls you a whore
that first night when you wore that top,
you’ve walked on eggshells ever since.
And it only got worse from there, didn’t it?
He fed from your sadness till you were almost hollow,
until all you have is your loneliness,
an alone that you can depend on more than family,
more than the people that once said
they would protect you from everything.
No one said everything didn’t include part-man
part-fiends who wear such angelic masks.
His words have slowly become ugly dark bruises
on your whole soul whilst he still makes others laugh.
Everyone has forgotten that Lucifer was beautiful too and God’s favourite till he fell.
It doesn’t need to be this way, though.
In all the stories, the chosen one is always alone.
He’s not the Prince Charming he was supposed to be,
instead he’s turned out to be a demon made of apathy.
He’s isolating you from everyone around you
yet he cannot isolate you from yourself.
But he doesn’t know your greatest secret,
your quietest and greatest strength.
You have Persephone hiding in those bones,
warrior queen of the dead who has been waiting to help.
Channel her and release everyone from his wicked spell,
Remind him why people say of you,
‘She wears strength and darkness equally well,
The girl has always been half goddess half hell.’
Metamorphosis
This locking yourself away
when you suffer,
it is alchemy in motion.
It is you rebuilding
your blood, your bones
and the spine you hold,
from an abysmal situation.
The watching of yourself mend
is a violent thing made of dread.
It is terrifying, I understand;
for you do not know what will emerge
from that cocoon, a butterfly
or a moth.
Princess Plain
This was my sin:
I was born plain, to a king who then had
two daughters prettier than me,
both younger, both softer.
My parents feared there would
be no one in this world to love me.
Yet I was lucky,
I was a king’s daughter.
A business prospect.
An alliance between kingdoms.
A prince maker.
Who needs love when you are an item of trade?
I made myself comfortable
without being loved,
realised that invisibility
comes with its benefits;
other women in court
do not see you as a threat.
I watched women be cruellest
to the one who was prettiest,
whisper in the darkness
about her virtue being compromised.
Apparently if you are without virtue
to a man, you become valueless.
And through this, I learned
that more than men ever could
women and girls scare me in ways
I haven’t even learned to articulate.
We all seem to be in some kind of
competition that none of us agreed to.
We all seem to love in a way
that says, ‘See, look. Look at the way
I am able to wrap whole kingdoms
Into my cherry blossom smile’
without saying ‘Look at the way
I sell myself in a smile like peaches
at your local fruit market.’
I am not beautiful in that way
that incurs wrath.
Nor am I beautiful in that way
that incurs desire.
I am safe amongst my own
for not learning
the art of being pretty.
Although from birth
I have been told that in not being so
I have failed my purpose as a whole.
Phoenix Blood
There are only two things
I am sure of in this world:
the first is, one day, this life
will come to its final
destination in death
The second: people will try to obliterate you,
and believe me, even the ones that once
promised you forever will betray you,
it never fails to happen
when love turns dark.
Do yourself a favour when this happens;
reclaim yourself from them.
I know you have been taught
to slice out your own heart,
hand it over again and again
to selfish hands, because it is all you
have known since you were a child.
You are an open wound
looking for someone to cure you.
And when they see that,
they will scratch at it,
steal your voice, thinking
your magic will go with it,
hoping your core swallows itself u
p.
This is where you remember
the lava of the volcano you come from,
your ancestors were made from fire
and it runs like hum that sings
through your own vein-rivers of blood.
You are not an open wound,
they just want you to think you are.
They have done this to every woman
before you, yet women were made to endure;
they become the earth,
they adapt like water,
they turn into diamonds to survive as who they are.
This is how we become magic,
we walk through fire and become more holy.
They try to break us,
we do not accept defeat.
They try to devastate us,
we still discover how to be happy.
They banish us to the depths of hell,
we just absorb and master the heat.
Man Up, Hercules
When I was a child,
my worst nightmare was to see my father cry.
Until I was older, I never really thought nor asked why.
It occurs to me now that the world around me
doesn’t want men to feel.
It emphasizes stoicism till they bottle up their feelings,
only one part of them is allowed to be real.
And if ever one of them falters, ‘man up’
becomes the dark magic to charm them back into line.