SARAH ELLIS - POEMS

Sarah Ellis is a creative writing student from southeastern Pennsylvania. She has been published in Bridge Ink Magazine. She spends most of her time drinking apple juice and playing the saxophone. Sarah is currently working on writing a collection of poetry and mastering the art of rearranging her feelings into coherent strings of words.

​when you’re the skinny girl

i’ve told my friends about how hard it is for me
to gain weight

they like to tell me in response
how they wish they had my problem

apparently, all guys want skinny girls
but i wonder if any of them will be forgiving enough
to love me without the curves of womanhood
without the stains of female in my hips and breasts

because all i have 

is a flat belly
the chest of an eighth-grade boy
and the hopes that maybe a boy can love
the skinny girl
that everyone somehow idolizes 

​

the man whose eyes i call mine
​

my mother continually recants the moments
in which my father put his face beside mine
shouting “look our eyes, they’re the same”

his triumph in how his genetics fought to carry on
a simple thing like the color of his eyes

i didn’t realize then that it was God’s way of leaving a piece of him
as a piece of me

the man whose name i wear
whose genes are bound in my skin
the man who made me, me
whose love taught me how to do my first-grade math homework

is the same man who i don’t know
whose voice is a foreign memory
somewhere intertwined in the giggles and joys of childhood

the man who gave me life
is the man who died early in mine
a father, a friend, a far-away face

​