That’s on you by Sophie Frankpitt

That’s on you

watch her fade away
her gaunt cheeks and
hollowed eyes, once
bouncing hair now in
tendrils, cheekbones
jut in sharp lines and
wrists that look too
fragile to touch, watch
her punish herself for
all she is not

that’s on you
all you taught us
all the pictures
the waist-touching,
leering, the men on
the street who shouted
at fifteen-year-old us,
the boys who lined us
up on the playground,
the dates women didn’t
come home from, the
streets we can’t walk
down, the live location
always on, hit by hit –

hit by hit –

scream by scream
deafened by other
women’s pleas
she fell to her knees
praying that her own pain –
the pain you so ironically
call self-made –
would distract her
from lifetimes of yours

*

Sophie Frankpitt is a poet and linguist from Somerset, England, having recently graduated from the University of Warwick with a Linguistics degree. She is a newly emerging poet, though she regularly performed spoken word in Amsterdam during the year she studied there.