Yours Truly 2017 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA 2017 YT Online Book | Page 92

McKenna’s Poem
Piper Toohey Olsen
Numb
I’m struggling to find the right words. How can you write about something that doesn’t exist?
How am I supposed to write when there aren’t even embers left of the fire that keeps me alive?
What do you want me to tell you, that I can’t hold a conversation because every syllable I speak must
force its way through layers of thick and unrelenting ice? I am a lake, I have been frozen over. I was
an ocean, I was a storm, I have been evaporating until there are only molecules left of me, loose and
disenfranchised, unbelonging, untethered, like the last breath of a being who has lived a thousand
lives.
There’s nothing left. Do not ask me to dance for you.
90