Ruby Appleby is a student and writer from New Zealand. She came third in the Year 13 division of the 2023 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook Student Poetry Competition, and she has also been published in Starling, Re-Draft, Flash Frontier, and a few other places.

Ruby Appleby

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Beneath the Skin

Peeling off the skin from your fingers
won't strip away the memory
of the knots they have tied, the petals
they have plucked. Your body is reborn clean
but your mind is permanently etched
with spray-painted scars, graffiti scrawled
across the walls—indelible reminders of your agency,
your atrocity. You deface yourself externally as you have
defaced smooth water and hands that reach out,
tentatively now, because they have been hurt before;
you seek justice, and so your defacement extends
inwards. As blood spills down your cuticles, so too does
a mirrored red waterfall in the thick fog of your mind—
for you, destruction is twofold, always.