by Sonya Sones

I am me,
but I am not.

I can’t be sure
whose face feels hot.

Is it mine?
Or is it its?

So strange how snug
this new mask fits…

Gazing in the mirror
over my sink,

staring into eyes
that refuse to blink,

holding my ground,
I stare right back

at eyes the deadest
shade of black…

I swallow hard.
This can’t be true—

when last I looked,
my eyes

were blue!

Copyright © 2009 Sonya Sones. From the book Half Minute Horrors. HarperCollins. Reprinted by permission of the author.

About this Poem

I wrote this poem when my poetry teacher, Myra Cohn Livingston, gave the class an assignment to write a poem about Halloween. Myra was a tough critic. If she liked what you wrote she would write “VG” on it, when she handed it back to you—which stood for “very good.”

Halloween Mask was one of the few poems of mine that actually received one of those prized “VG”s from Myra.

About The Author

Sonya Sones has written five YA novels-in-verse: Stop Pretending, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, its companion, What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know, and To Be Perfectly Honest: A Novel Based on an Untrue Story which was released in August, along with The Sonya Sones Collection, a three book set.

You can visit her at SonyaSones.com, follow her at twitter.com/SonyaSones, or friend her at www.facebook.com/sonya.sones

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