Pain and Cigarettes
when I was 21
I let them
take chunks
of flesh from me
with their sharp words,
tongues cutting like
a surgeon's blade
deftly reducing me
to a perfect size 7,
a model
of what they wanted
me to be;
starved myself,
existed on pain
and cigarettes,
slowly shrinking
into a sliver
of silence
B.Y. Penman 2021