NORTHEAST OHIO YOUTH OUTLET

Under the Skin

Poetry by ​Jessica Chang

Day 1

you fit so perfectly into the hollow of me that I didn’t even notice
when we stopped being two and became
one.


Day 2

you were an unwanted body-sharer.
I didn’t want
your extra pounds of flesh
weighing me down.


Day 7

slowly, our hearts beat as one,
blood vessels fused, like soldered iron, into one tendrilled map.


Day 35

you had one lung and I had the other.
I hated
not being able to breathe without you.
my ribs expanded to make space for your innards,
expanded until they cracked.


Day 156

your fingers were so slender, spidery, almost.
they were manipulative, with a mind of their own.
once, they tried to strangle us in our sleep.
we would have been dead
if my windpipe hadn’t been so damn strong.


Day 438

it was the small changes.
food tasted like sand,
arms and legs all covered in small, silvery marks.


Day 760

sometimes I got hives, my body’s small way
of rejecting you.
red, angry welts speckle my skin.
I tried to claw you
out of me.


Day 1156

we were all over the place,
liver where the pancreas should be,
an extra appendix there,
a missing spleen,
kidneys smashed, intestines spilling over,
and abscesses blooming in the
s p a c e s
in between.


Day 1461

when we went to the doctor’s, they told me
I was going to die early.
epigenetic changes, they said.
probably cancer, but maybe also
heart disease or a stroke.
serves you right.
                                   

Jessica Chang

Jessica Chang is a rising senior at Hathaway Brown high school and lives in Hudson, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Lake Erie Ink and won a Scholastic silver medal in poetry.