Madeline Besso, a sophomore at Mount Mansfield Union High School, says that when she suffers writer’s block, she turns to her friends for inspiration. For this poem, a fellow Young Writers Project writer helped her out. “I asked a few friends for a completely random first line to a poem; the lovely Zabira Silver gave me ‘she stank of sunlight.’ It is one of the few poems that I wrote directly onto the YWP site. There was very little editing involved.”
She Stank of Sunlight
By Madeline Besso
She stank of sunlight.
It streamed through her hair and under her lashes and
turned her irises to ochre-tourmaline-gold.
Conventional beauty was not something that could
be honestly applied to her –
slightly too off-center and
far too alive to be a Plasticine doll.
Big blue eyes were highly overrated, and hers were
brilliant amber, polished by
tears and lit by
sunlight.
Her skin was too pale to be called gold, but
the sun had left its mark in it, and she used to
lie on the ground and wait for the
characteristic burn to form across her
cheekbones.
She always did have a talent for photosynthesis.