She was eating bugs again,
the sitter admitted
with muted shame,
audible disgust.
The poet at seven
sat motionless
in her living room,
throned by a couch nest
of knitted blankets and novels, skin
pale as the dog-eared pages with
undiagnosed deficiencies;
perpetually cold like an old woman
in an empty house,
who tugs the shawl a little nearer
to her throat.
It was not about the taste,
when the girl grew angry enough
to slowly rub ants into the grooves
of the plastic patio table
and lift what was left
to her small, white lips.
Ingrid Alva Belcher is a College third-year majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Art History. She is especially interested in Surrealism and syntax, and works as an editor for Lunchbreak Review.
