her lungs were once

a palace garden that grew

white rose painted with blood and

divine daffodils dancing on the doorstep and

ivy that curled and twisted over

the walls of her bronchial tubes and

peach pits in her alveoli that sprung up

into skyscrapers and

crimson poppies

with petals like butterfly wings and

supernovas of petals in her bronchioles

(the garden was the first they took away;

lungs aren't meant to grow flowers)

she lay on the floor in the middle

of the prison enclosed in

what they called a sanctuary

(gunmetal gray on all 6 sides)

and with her chipped nails she

scratched poetry

into the indifferent ground

and wondered how long it would take

to dig through the lethal walls

with her plastic fingertips

and of the fatal world on the other side

that would squeeze all the dawn-colored blood

from her asphyxiated veins

and paint with them on the walls

for all humanity to see

that she was a monster

(these walls gave no sunlight;

the darkness smothered her)

breathe

b-r-e-a-t-h-e

breath, alice.

oxygen tasted strange in her shuddering lungs

now barren without the garden

that had made her feel alive

she exhaled stars, suns, and moons

breathing dreams like air

painting nebulas and supernovas

flashing forestgreen neonblue

pastelpink indigold and black

against the gray gray gray gray gray

she breathed her dreams to paint her cage

painting dreamlike civilizations on titan

and saturn's rings flashing iridescent colors

and jupiter dancing with callisto and europa

and starcrossed lovers ripped apart by a star in between

and uranus leaning against it's belt of ice

while mirranda and titania did pirouettes around him

she imagined shattered stars

and the milky way

like a pearly scar in the universe

she imagined exploding suns

and the lachrymose tunes

between constellations

imagined disoriented pinpricks of light

in the broken sky

and she stargazed into the universe she'd created

(her breaths still held magic in its strands)

she imagined blackholes in which

she was about to drown in

and now she was at the event horizon

about to be sucked into another universe

one better than this one

she imagined wonderland

on the other side

imagine me

master of my own universe

i am everything i ever dreamed of

-tahereh mafi