Where I'M From Poem by Heidi Wiggin

The Holy Bible rules blackened by the mangled interpretations of the two holiest people alive. The elder and his wife that attend church every Sunday. The rulers of the hell I used to call home. Where fire burned til I was 7 years old and we got AC. At night that AC would cool the sheets to my bed I was never allowed to sleep in and made my concrete mattress a bed of ice. Ice that froze my blood more and more every night until my heart became too weak to follow its natural beat. I lay dead on the basement floor that was crawling with earwigs and scurrying with mice. Mice that knew of no such place as the psych ward where my best friend lived for over a month. A month after they sent us home from the policeman's hide out and told us we were lucky to have ever been adopted. They said we lied cuz cps always claimed that house was too peaceful to contain a family of seven. They didn't want to know the chaos that was trapped inside our doors. So they said to respect our parents and turned their backs. And we dreamt no longer of salvation cuz we found hope was a shipwreck with no survivors.