The ruins by Safa Maryam

The ruins of girlhood,

Are scrawled in rhinestone-stickered diaries,

The secret tales of heartbreak preserved,

On tear-splattered pink pages,

In a code so clever,

Its author can no longer decipher it.

The ruins of girlhood,

Are scattered amongst fairy wings and Barbie limbs,

That day we sat down to play,

And no story revealed itself to me,

Not then, nor ever again,

No magic, just plastic,

And her repeated pleas,

For big sister to try,

To pretend I could pretend,

Just one last time.

The ruins of girlhood,

Are splintered beneath gymnasium bleachers,

Where I sat and watched, third row from the top,

How we lost in the name of charity,

And she spilled with the promise of comedy,

What she’d spotted earlier on my sleeve,

Naïve by the bathroom sinks,

I’d revealed my cards and they’d shown his face,

So when she pointed into the crowd at full-time,

And his eyes found an undesired prize,

I returned home unclaimed,

Heart shattered by a boy’s laughter.

The ruins of girlhood,

Lie somewhere in between the kitchen door,

And the spot on the living room floor,

Where the word was spat out,

By a man with a face like my father’s,

Bitch.

Others, I’d heard,

Others, he’d etched,

Deep into the walls of my ears,

Cry-baby Sensitive

But bitch was new,

Bitch was no bruise,

It was the tectonic plates of our places,

Shifting,

And a realising,

That sometimes a father,

Is simply a man,

Who had a daughter.

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Safa Maryam is a poet and doctor from the North. Her work has been featured in Dear Damsels, Mslexia, New Writing North, and Medical Women. She was longlisted for the Mslexia Poetry Competition in 2023, and a finalist in 2022. She can be found on Instagram @bysafamaryam