Beauty Kills Poem by Stefanie rodriguez

Tonight,5OO faces will learn the scrape of a forest,
Their cheeks,
Will forever hold the red hiding beneath the fingernails of the gravel they will be dragged through.
Tonight 5OO women will go missing,
5OO women will learn to stay visible for the cat calls,
For the men,
For the camera
Don't we all always want all eyes on us!
This us how we stay beautiful
Teach ourselves how to stay beautiful.
We crimp. Curl. Blow. Straighten. Grease. Scrub every inch, make it shine. exfoliate. Slather. Style. Stuff. Comb.
Women do crazy things in attempt to find themselves.
They go missing.
They chew their tongues into kaleidoscopes,
And gift boxes
They become milk carton faces,
And 9 o'clock news segments
Dusty attic photographs,
Liquor and caskets,
echoes
And dead bodies
And dead bodies

Britanee Drexel
A 17 year old girl from Rochester with a smile like 32 porcelain dolls standing hand in hand,
Her laugh,
Reminiscent of ocean breeze bathing in the moon light some would say.
She was Nile river rapids,
Dancing beneath the hum of eyeliner.
Her eyes,
Three shades of contacts purchased over the counter.
Her tongue,
The first blazing sunset you'd ever witnessed red and roaring,
With a mouth like a burning toy chest.
She was last spotted on April 25th,
Leaving the Myrtle Beach Hotel.
There has been no activity on her cell phone or ATM account since.

Britanee
Imagine that you'd had found your voice 6 years ago instead of two.
What kind of god would you pray to?
Would your arms have have committed suicide without telling you?
Would you be the girl who plays with fire or the one who falls in love with it?
Would you be here?
Would you be here now?
Instead of magician kissed or duffel bag broken?

In NYC alone,
1 in every 8 women fall victim to their beauty.
Will be found bound and strapped to the pounding of a car trunk.

They are phanton pom-pom girls, with the innocence of mystery plastered to their backs.
The trees don't have eyes but we've plastered their faces to the woods.
Here
The trees smell like the smolder of a thousand grieving families,
Like the burning of a thousand flat irons sitting in bellies of dressers somewhere in the rooms of sisters and daughters.

We crimp. Curl. Blow. Straighten. Grease. Scrub every inch, make it shine. exfoliate. Slather. Poise. Style. Stuff. Comb.
Smile pretty girl, smile pretty girl.
LOOK AT THE CASKET THEY'VE THROWN THEMSELVES INTO! !

We can still hear them whisper
'In case I go missing at least I'll be pretty enough for a news coverage'
Tonight 5OO women will go missing
Don't we all always want all eyes on us!