✷
She opens her obsidian eyes with no breath in her lungs,
for the room about her stands empty of air,
or so she feels.
The Doll brings her porcelain fingertips to her heart;
she discovers the hole in her chest,
and the absence of a million of her heartbeats.
Her constant companions rest scattered all over her place,
fragments of simple and terrible losses.
The Doll walks amid flimsy pictures and sounds.
She sips the impossible with her dramatic red lips —
friendly features now unknown and distant.
There lives a world where she is not included,
so the Doll despises her reflection,
for she can't build a place anew with comparable ease.
And yet she murmurs to her mirror-self:
Acceptance and integration require more than just a moment.
Still, confusion and dejection prevail and her chest,
once brimming with daisies, appears dense with surreal emptiness.
Over and over, to her silvery image the Doll utters —
you were the person I best knew and I forgive you,
even though you've become a gathering of complicated wants.
✷──────────✷──────────✷
Petra F. Bagnardi is a writer, a screenwriter, and a poet. She worked for the Italian TV network, RAI, and her poetry was published by various literary journals and magazines including, Masque & Spectacle Literary Journal, Punk Noir Magazine, Poetica Review, Drawn to the Light Press, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Sunlight Press, Blydyn Square Review, and more. She was short-listed in the Enfield Poets' 20th Anniversary Poetry Competition and won second place in the Wax Poetry and Art Magazine’s poetry contest. She is a bilingual author, in English and Italian.
