I am a vulture

picking at the carcass of my teenage dream.

I yank the bones out of the dead dove

as you tell me about the time you had sex in a car and

I think about how I haven’t even kissed a girl.

The meat is fresh and I tear into it desperately,

savoring anything that tastes like summer nights.

But, soon, the dove evades my talons,

and I am left with a spiraling hunger,

Hunger for a teenage boy to look at me

in a way that would make my skin crawl;

I don’t want him but I need him to want me.

Need him to tell me I’m worthy

like I need to leave the nest and kill the dove

a thousand times over.

But I fear I’ll never be lost of it.

The dove cannot haunt me because it refuses death,

but now I am stuck ripping into scraps of a girlhood

that was not made with me in mind.