They are women before they are girls, learn how to tear the plastic seals off lipstick tubes before they learn how to count to three. They crawl under thousand-year-old ironing boards and watch their mothers’ bird-bone fingers iron their fathers’ picture-perfect Ralph Lauren polos, smoothing away every crease as if they could mend a lifetime of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams the way they could a torn apron. When their mothers bend down to pick up their empty laundry baskets and walk...

After “Bad New Government” by Emily Berry Darling, don’t ever think for a second, a minute, hours, that I don’t understand the clink, clatter, clang of your hollow heart, hunting for a thousand and one reasons to be happy and hopeful, even when the world is crumbling faster than the chipped ivory towers we spent our childhoods reading about, where princesses with porcelain-doll skin and powdered rose petal lips only left their pristine prisons when their knights in shining armor...

She turns back the sands of her hourglass hips, weaves/ gilded wings onto her shattered spine so she can soar/ through the winds like Icarus