ANGELIQUE TAVERAS
11TH GRADE
SCHOOL
Tight grips on handshakes
every morning.
The school is grey and the
inside is colorful.
Long skirts and golden buttons that my
mom had sewn on the night before.
Losing and gaining weight had
become so frequent that it was
almost a talent of mine.
The mineral pavement floors roughly
scuffed the bottoms of my black flats.
The school is grey and the
inside is colorful.
I always wondered how it would
look from the outside looking in.
The school is grey but the
inside is colorful and I never
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felt grey looking at it.
psychedelic silhouette or a snow globe.
giant label you have branded me with.
Inside my mind was tempted by the
fruit of knowledge that seemed to
be forbidden in this part of town.
But I wasn’t holding the snow
globe. I was merely a smudge
on the side of a road.
At the age of 12, I found comfort
in the silence of night and its
blue wife, loneliness.
Some nights it amazed me how small
and insignificant my problems could be.
I am not going to let myself be defined
because although I believe in the
power of words, one word or even a
group of words will never be enough
to convey the person I’ve become.
Together we sat at the edge of my
bed watching the world move
past us and freeze all at once.
Those nights when insomnia wrapped
me up in his cold arms and told me
he would never leave my side.
Those nights when I swam in translucent pools of brilliance allowing my
skin to get sun kissed in waters of words.
No one truly understands how hard
it is to swim against the current.
The school is grey but the
inside is colorful.
There were nights when I looked at the
world through my bedroom window
and everything looked like it was a
The school is grey and the
inside is colorful.
I am not going to let you guess my
past dating back to the history of my
ancestors so you can create a better
image of the person I was raised to be.
The bottoms of my eyes were hugged
by purple moons that let everyone
know just how much education
can mean to a 6th grader.
I am not my reflection because
it does not define my worth.
On the outside I looked grey but my
insides were drowning in colors that
the world hasn’t even invented yet.
NOT A WORD
I am not a word.
I am not the skin that wraps itself
around my body, yet that’s what others
use when they attempt to describe me.
I am not perfect, obviously. Nor would
I want to be because I’ve realized
that who I am today is far more interesting than perfect will ever be.
I am not a sentence or even
a line of sentences holding
hands to form a thought.
I am not going to sit in the box you have
placed me in, carrying the weight of the
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