Poetry by KC Bailey

Youth Songs & Wardrobe Doors

Don’t know where she went

the young girl

singing in the mirror –

Crowded House and REM

Didn’t realise how perfect you were

feeling awkward

so fearlessly free but trapped

lost in Pearl Jam

If I knew how to reach you

tell you I miss everything,

even the flaws

you saw

You’d never believe anyone

could envy you. I do –

if I could go back,

be fifteen-year-old me again (teenage us)

I miss being the me I was –

my younger self,

you. Us.

The future got harder,

I got harder –

the past was imprecise

I’d swap with you

if it meant you didn’t turn

into me.

KC Bailey dreams of living in a cabin in the woods, near a serene lake, with space for her giant rescue dog to roam & rest. Poems in The Ekphrastic Review, The Hellebore, Black Bough, The Tide Rises, The Failure Baler, Eye Flash Poetry, Fevers of the Mind, 5050 Lit, The Daily Drunk, TunaFish Journal, Crow & Cross Keys, Amethyst Review, and elsewhere (Twitter @KCBailey_Writer).