3rd place winner of the poetry contest: self-portrait as a firefly - Katie Kim

Mom says, there are trillions of cells inside you 
and each one loves you. I try to believe her, but I blame myself 

each time I bite my fingernails to blood. Each time 
the man idles in his neon yellow Prius too long 

at the corner, his eyes holding questions I can’t silence.
Meanwhile, spring lizards map my antennae, their tongues gone 

sticky in summer’s moonless dark. She says, even in dark, the body
makes its own light. We are our own moons, peripheral 

redness constellating the corners of my sight. Even in downpour, inside
sun-fists thrown like rice into the steam of August. Even then— 

my little moon blinks, keeps blinking, keeps lighting 
the matchstick of my belly until it softens into sleep.

Even as I sleep, the night owls still watch like mothers.
Last night, when I curled my body into its crescent 

of sleep, my mother’s words filled my dreamscape’s 
technicolor clouds: ae-gi-ya1, you were never the world’s

favorite girl—but you do know how to glow. Never lose that.

​

Katie Kim is a student attending Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. As a writer, she is particularly interested in poetry and realistic fiction. Her work has previously appeared in Altered Reality, Backwards Trajectory, and Avant Appalachia. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, and the Advanced Ellipsis Writing Workshop. As well as creative writing, Katie enjoys visual art and playing the oboe.