Erasures

Shavings of eraser skin clot her eyelashes And she’s afraid to blink Because she doesn’t want the flakes to drop in her eyes It all hung above her head like a thunderstorm The ridicule The bruises beneath her rind The water stains on her cheeks And on her pillowcase The goodbye letter engraved in interim graphite On a leaf of flimsy notebook paper The words so crestfallen So true So meaningless to the world That it took her pencil and flipped it on its end And scraped her pallid heart away from the page And showered her with the erasures And then overlapped the ghost with ‘LOSER!’ And now she has the cure against her vein And she could swim away from the storm in a red rivulet But the shards of eraser still have her too afraid to blink