Truth is I would like to escape myself
Truth is I would like to escape myself.
Detach my body from my skin,
peel it layer by layer to uncover
beneath the surface of petals
and thorns piled up year after year,
who I am and who I want to be.
I want to be the flower that grows
in dirt, the feather that flies free between
the cracks of fences. A wise woman
once told me, don’t worry about you,
worry about who you could be.
I want to be the woman who sits
on a desk and writes pieces of oceans,
rivers on a white space in a place
where imagination has no border.
![Illustration by Linda Dalal Sawaya of a human figure coming out of a flower](https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/cdn-test.poetryfoundation.org/content/images/325bc0fa9974f81be86f49446f234780b1dd1ca5.png)
Source: Poetry (March 2021)