Lit-zine
JU
Rebecca Easton
We are not this
The Boat
Please
Tension
Rebecca Easton is an English major at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. In her experience as a writer, she has received three Scholastic Art and Writing Awards keys on the regional level, as well as a silver medal on the national level. Rebecca attended Messiah College’s Young Writers Workshop in the summer of 2014, and joined her local library’s writers group the following year. She has been published in Vox, the on-campus literary magazine, participated in an open-mic event at Elizabethtown College, and taught a writing workshop in her hometown. When she is not writing (which is quite rare), she is playing video games or singing.
You might as well chain
me up to a goddamn
wall and feed me the
scraps that your pigs
won’t touch.
Even now, I can already
feel the bite of your
whip as it lashes
my spine and leaves
craters on my back. If
being myself is such a
crime, then why don’t
you throw me in jail?
Why do you have to
stretch out my pain
while I am helpless to
put a stop to it, because
you’re “more than welcome
to do what you will” but
I have to “suck it up and
deal with the real world?”
In this country, where
justice is as common as
air, why is it so difficult
to breathe?
She sees calamity abound,
and hears agonized screams resound.
Yet she stands tall to face her fears
as she has done for countless years.
And though waves batter relentlessly,
she paddles her boat on tirelessly.
Chasing the horizon, where the sun
is ever rising, but never done
with its ascent. And towards that line
she rows and rows, for all of time.
Though she is lonely in the dark
she sighs and dreams of meadowlark,
of tree and flow’r and mountain peak
covered in snow, and robin beak.
To find land once again would be
the greatest gift, which is why she
continues to press through the storm
hoping one day she will be warm.
I want you to push me, but not too far
I want you to hit me, but not too hard.
The pain makes me feel like I’m alive
The pain makes me forget I’m dead inside.
I want you to bite me with fangs like ice
I want you to scratch me, don’t play nice.
I like how my body reacts to the hurt
I like how I lose track of what I am worth.
I want you to burn me ’til I turn to dust
I want you to drown me ’til I start to rust.
And I will find peace with the muscles that ache
And I will find peace with the bones that break.
There’s tension
it’s hot and taut like a flaming
rope and your chest is full of
lead and stone and you can’t
breathe and you can’t think and you
can’t see anything around you but you
feel it all too much, the details seep
in through your fingertips and race around
your veins and enter your bloodstream
and the lights are bright—who turned them
on and why are they so intense—but it doesn’t
matter because you’re on the ground with your
fingernails scratching the carpet as you try to
tear something, anything that isn’t a part of your
body but the fibers are too small to grip onto so you
start tearing at your hair, even though you said you
wouldn’t hurt yourself again maybe just this once you
won’t break the skin but you do and it bleeds and it burns
and you feel like you’re on fire from your feet to your lungs and then
nothing.