Ore

By Firyal Quraishi Paladini, 15, Texas

my home smells like baking grass and diluted smoke

it tastes like salt, like when i 

used to lick my hands as a child and came up with a mouthful  of the earth

or when i chewed the soft bit of the pine tree under the bark

because i stayed in their grasp

long enough to hear my own stomach.

my hair got stuck in leaves and leaves in my hair,

and i was a thing that couldn’t be touched, something 

far away and

suspended

in limbo instead of branches.

the world tastes like salt, like tears.

tears in skin and cartilage and lashes from broken guitar strings

pinched wrists

pimple scabs

scratches from claws and nails and skidding on

tumbling rocks, pulling me down, into their jagged beds.

my home lifts me then, onto red knees, towards 

the trees.

they hold me, and

i realized i like the taste of metal,

of skin I knew would break 

and heal over stronger due to 

love, and care,

not spite. 

i could have made a proper home there

where i was loved,

where blood burned into hammered sheets of

bronze and iron, burnished shields.

the dryads danced and so did i in 

helios’ rays,

and when i collapsed with blisters and chapped lips

the blood on my feet was collected by the

flower crowns of nature spirits, and

i was loved. 

but in the end i was a coward, and i

ran back home where there was 

food and

phones and

duvets i’d learned to wash myself. 

the world tastes like tears, but

salt is good for you–

that sense of good is always accompanied by 

the bitter aftertaste of blood, but

i don’t crave blood.

that choice, that knowledge,

not the gasp of unexpectedness but 

the sigh of a result I knew would come–

that

i crave not blood but metal,

the taste of iron oxide. 

---

My favorite place when I was younger was the forest. I used to stay out there for hours and fantasize about living outside forever, because I didn’t want to be at home. In this poem, the blood and tears are a metaphor for the pain that comes from the industrial world/traditional home, and metal is used to symbolize the armor/protection from that pain that the protagonist receives from the natural world. Although she prefers the protection of that metal, in the end she leaves the forest and returns to the industrial world because she knows it’s best for her.

Instagram: @fi_verdream

Photo by Sebastian Unrau