Stuffed

by Aditi Singh

art by Emma Hwang

Soft brown bear, enveloped with velvety fur

(nobody sees the needle that dug into my skin while I couldn’t scream)

Made to love (made to sell),

made to breathe (made to gasp for air) —

all covered the flat gray of a Dartmouth sweatshirt.

Perfect from the gift store: 

internship-hunting job-searching academia-whoring quiet girl

mess of greasy black hair buried in the folds of a gray sweatshirt,

smudged eyeliner, and salt-caked sorel boots,

collapsed in the third floor of a library filled with empty bodies,

empty minds.

Where sociology and gender studies are layups instead of lives,

where lives are commodified and commodities are bastardized.

Snap away at my seams, 

unravel me one stitch at a time.

Dig your nails inside my chest, 

press your fingertips into the flesh above my sternum.

Crack my rib cage in two —

corporate machine distorting human bodies,

metal snapping a lobster shell you can’t wait to devour. 

My veins run thick with the red nail polish I paint over every other morning.

Pull them from beneath my skin

unwind my body, declutter my soul.

Rip them out,

those unwelcome cypress knees in a marsh of exploitation

You watch the explosion of scarlet stuffing erupt from my body —

comforting, familiar, 

delectable.