By: Margaret Marcum

Fifteen

and afraid. I made my family go away.
And I record the days carefully in my
composition book, as if knowing gives
me control over disappearing, as if I’m a
scientist of my body observing the duration
of its disappearance from another room.

Or that I might see it coming the next time,
and the next time, and the times after that.
I count the days like I’m counting down
to my sixteenth birthday.
I write them down in ink and get a little
high crossing each day gone bye.
I have to trust what they say,
there’s only hope in staying.

Fifteen
and alone, naked and begging for love,
not to have agreed to be taken away
from what I love.

No one is home

You sent me away, and I struggled to find my
way home; and once a body knows it
can never not know, we can
forget and breathing never stops,
inhaling the air where we are not,

dodging snakes crawling from my mind
into the green pain of grass and the long
jagged hills I should have climbed.
Although it was already late,
I couldn’t run fast enough
to beat the dark.

I wake in the morning and nothing has
changed—I run through a house filled with
smooth faces, trying to find you,
to tell you how sorry I am. And the door has
been open this entire time, and I imagine this
means that nothing is different so I can keep running—
I ask the youngest where you are, where you’ve
been, and I’m told you’ve already gone
a while ago and I scream,
What!
My cry is a broken siren on a runaway
ambulance, and I try to call you from my phone—
I just want to know what happened, why
I can’t hear you clearly anymore, but
the screen goes blank and now it’s just my
younger self humming a sad song so softly. Only
I can hear it, as I climb up the stairs back
into my head, and the lights go out: no

one is home.

She

is with him because
he makes her laugh.

She gives so much,
but it’s not good.

She cries into her hands and
pretends they’re his, which have
become too weak to let
them receive; she hides them in her
sleeve and believes what he says,
but it’s not good.

She finds her way back home, even though
she feels she’s going away.

Fat Girl

Eating is fuel.
Eating is transcendence.
Eating is self-defense.

Though I eat nothing, everything
around me grows smaller, and
I stay the same, though
I have less room
for error. And I run
until I’m away from myself,
who used to consume,
because it makes me more.

Dirty Window

The fog hugs the glass like a ghost. From the other side,
a fire behind my chest traps the smoke behind my lips and
silver water beneath my eyelids, just a side effect
from the heat.

The people behind the window saying,
I’m still not ready.
No locks on the windows,
we’re too far away.

In my safer place,
I feel with white gloves
I could be home.

###

Margaret Marcum recently graduated from the MFA program in creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Her poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Barzakh Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, NonBinary Review, and Children, Churches, and Daddies, among others. She is also author of the poetry chapbook, Recognition of Movement (Bottlecap Press, 2023).