Five Brothers

by Penelope Douglas

Everything in life is about power, and it wasn’t that I was taught that I didn’t have any. I learned that men would like me better if I didn’t show it.

All I ever wanted was to love waking up. To be counted on to make someone’s life better. And I want a man who breathes me. Who craves me and needs me.

This could be it.

“I think someone should be making you smile, is all.”

“You’re a good girl,”

Without ever writing a word, I was a poet.

I saw beauty in the unlikely places that scared my parents. In abandoned train tracks. The foster home hells where my friends lived. In house fires, motorcycle crashes, and the destruction in the wake of a storm. In living too hard and dying too young.

“Doing what you have to in order to survive isn’t noble if your soul can’t survive you,”

If I’m not dead, then I’m not done.