Shout

by Laurie Halse Anderson

My sobs captured in bubbles heard only after they popped,

And then green August, melting-hot days running out the bottom of the hour- glass, school time marching relentlessly toward the children of summer so intent on capturing every free minute, like flowers to be pressed between the pages of a book.

bored and stuck in hardening concrete up to my chin

12. I wasn’t just encased in hardening concrete up to my chin; it was pouring down my throat. I was in a race to see if I would die from the outside in or the inside out.

can rats get in our lockers did I leave that book at home how much longer do I have to stay and pretend to pray to this empty altar, when will the bell release me so I can flip the page of this script to the shoulder-slumping eternal sigh of time to go to class again

but I began myself again

started chipping away at my concrete cage

Grandpa looked surprised, like when an always-late bus arrives early

Cancer ate most of his wife but her pregnant womb was the fortress resisting the final bite long enough to breathe life into their phoenix child, who was born in bitter grace.

my father and my sister poured the wet ocean of my mother into the car

Moralizing no? I think this would work better as memoir

an invasive species growing out of a stump of a tree hit by lightning growing from the girl who survived

Unwilling avatar for silenced girls, our Ophelia, seen only though the male gaze; pale gray construct constantly throwing herself at boys and rivers. Found a few strands of her hair on a berry bush which I plucked and wove into the tapestry unconscious, she later sprang from my forehead, fully formed, as Melinda.

And Barbie? I’ve got nothing to say to that bitch.

Not till she learns to walk flat-footed, like a real woman.

yeah honestly, ma’am grow up, and i will share this thought

don’t call it a period: call it an exclamation point

right like objectively this is terrible

shame turned inside out is rage.

perhaps not enough done with this idea

when you get a letter from jail the envelope is stamped “Not Responsible for Contents” but somehow, we are