By Kaelynn Vuong

Sometimes, I think that my body is just a cage. The cage rusts and pulsates against my
skin. My bones are the bars, supported by my tendons, and my flesh twines around them
together. As a whole, the cage moves, it lives and it breathes, and it takes my breath. It takes my
energy to keep the cage, I am the warden but I do not know the prisoner. I think at one point,
whatever was locked in that cage, in me, was light and fluttery. It was happy and acted like a
heart, second to my beating, bleeding heart. All it did was pulse, and throb, and flutter, like
something gleeful, if not carefree, because a happy prisoner is still a prisoner. I don’t know if it
had ever known freedom, but I know that, at some point, it met its escape through death.
I don’t know when it died, or how. I assume through suffocation, as the pulsing mass of
flesh around the bars grew and throbbed to the cadence of my own heart, crowding and
narrowing the cage. I did not feel its death, but I felt it when it started to decompose. I felt it so
strongly, that everywhere I stepped, I smelled the stench of rotting flesh. I felt the skin and flesh
of the prisoner melt and slide off the bones, seeping deep into my own flesh, running thick with
my blood. I felt that I could see the seepage stain my veins, the dark color a stark contrast against
my tanned skin. I felt I could see the ashen bones, drained of all color as the glowing cage of
flesh drank the life out of the bones. The bones appeared to me, in the corner of my vision,
everywhere I turned. They seemed bleached, as white as a skeleton left in the sun for eons. The
bones burned me, burned my eyes, and temporarily, I was blinded. I would turn too fast, catch
too long of a look at the bones, and be blinded. I would blink, and my vision would spot, and I
felt that the world would burn, but I could not feel if I was burnt.
The bones, hollowed and thinned with age, clicked and clanged together with each step I
took, reverberating to some semblance of a song that only I could hear. I can picture the tune as
some haunting call of death, attracting carrion birds to circle above my head. I can see them,
stalking me, looking for the source of the stench. I picture no further, I can see. I can see their
confusion, turkey vultures, waiting to swoop on their prey. What they do not realize is that I am
the source. I am rotten, and the rot runs through my veins, and the only flesh to eat is mine. But
they must wait longer, they must wait for the rot to devour me. For the death in my veins to
spread to my body. The prisoner has died, and it has left something of fury. The wrath, I can feel
it, is crawling along the cage. It is coaxing the rot in my veins to come to it. To eat through my
flesh, through me. The flesh is necrotizing tissue by tissue, and I will fall soon. My flesh will
shrivel slowly, and rot inside my skin. My skin will grow sallow, and it will sag. My flesh will
fall from my bones, blackened and rotting and oozing, but my skin will remain intact. Stronger
than my flesh, strong like my bones, like the bars of the cage. My skin will hold, and I will walk.
I am entranced by the tune and I try and try to twirl and step in rhythm to the song of the bones
in the cage, calling to me. But I cannot. I cannot dance, I can barely step forward. My flesh
weighs me down by each step, and the turkey vultures are looking. They know what I am by
now. Prey.

Kaelynn Vuong is an Asian American poet and an author from the Texas. Her favorite authors include Michelle Zauner and Cristopher Paolini. In her free time, she enjoys multi-medium crafts and reading.