“Undress” Print by Clare Elsaesser
“Turn around.”
“Just do it, okay?”
“I mean it; it’s embarrassing.”
“If you’re not going to, at least close your eyes.”
Looking down, all she sees is a deformity.
Other girls don’t look like this, she thinks,
Staring at her cut out chest.
Yes, she might be a pretty face,
A kind soul,
An aspiring intellectual,
Glowing at every moment,
But it is what is underneath her perfectly buttoned up facade,
That she is ashamed for others to see.
She wishes they would stop staring,
Attempting to figure out why her shirt does not lay the way theirs do.
Constantly tugging and pulling,
She curses gravity.
In fact, she curses herself,
But she knows that all
The yelling,
Crying,
Resenting,
Won’t make the anger disappear.
Looking blankly into the wall,
A vortex of forest palettes
Stares right back at her empty bosom.
Resistant to blink and lose the contest to a sheet of plaster,
She gives up.
“Can I look?”
“Yes”, she says,
Diligently staring at the innocent boy perched on her bed,
“You can look now”.
Things Hannah Writes 