Someone Asks Me Why I Used to Cut Myself

I cut my thighs at 12 because I liked the look of it, the sting, liked sneaking glances at the marks in the bathroom while girls talked around me through stalls. I liked the parallel lines, the weak pink flush of healing, of skin opening up. I liked giving in to urges. I liked rattling my tin can of razor blades and hiding them in my bedside table. I liked a secret. I liked pressing the pain from over the fabric of my skirts and feeling it ache, feeling it burn. Letting it bleed. I liked wiping up blood with thin tissues, watching red leak through fabric and get soaked in. I liked shoving tissues to the bottom of trash cans. I liked that I had left a mark. I liked that they would fade, slowly, puckering, and linger in a new color forever. I like how the scars are mine alone.

Hallie Fogarty is a poet, teacher, and artist from Kentucky. She received her MFA in poetry from Miami University, where she received the 2024 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Award for Poetry and where she now teaches Composition and Rhetoric. Her work has been published in Pegasus, Poetry South, Barzakh Magazine, and elsewhere.