Hilary Biehl
She hates them – those glass women
who might be shattered but not
stained. Whereas she’s unfired clay and can
be pinched or smudged
by any man. Impertinently
pure, they hurled their own torn out
tongues, trampled dragons, cracked
spikes, blinded, burned – she curls up
in a ball, breasts intact, beasts unbraved.
Really, what would it have meant
to be ‘saved’? To remain a shard
of winter, a splinter of sun, instead
of the girl who gingerly steps
around it, thinking if I were dead?
Hilary Biehl’s poems have appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Liminality, Mezzo Cammin, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and their son in Santa Fe, New Mexico.