The most unsettling thing about the girls in Alisha S.'s «Broken.» is how ordinary they look. They go to school, they laugh, they answer questions. The poem is built on the distance between that surface and what lies beneath it, and it follows one girl to the only place where the two can finally meet.
It opens with a grammatical oddity: "Broken girls, / Housed in a broken body." Plural girls, singular body. Whether or not this was planned, it works. The girls become a type, many people sharing one experience, while the body is a single damaged container. What follows is an image of fragmentation, pieces "scattered, some buried, some floating in the middle of the ocean." The line sprawls across the page, so the pieces feel as far apart as the words. Then comes a flat, four-word verdict: "None of them are whole."
The middle section is the most concrete writing in the poem. "Long sleeved shirts cover up the scars, / bracelets hide the bandaids." Judging by these details, the poem hints at self-harm, but it never names it, and that restraint is part of the effect. The verbs "cover" and "hide" keep returning, so concealment becomes a routine. The simile of fear as "a tightly knotted restraint on their lips, as good as any mouth guard" is strange and effective. A mouth guard protects an athlete from a blow, but here it keeps something in. The comparison suggests these girls are well-trained at silence. Against this, "bright, tinkling laughs" sounds like glass: light, musical and brittle. The ellipsis after "inside..." lets the sentence trail off before the scene changes.
That change is signalled by a neat, bitter line: "the last question answered with the last lie." The repeated "last" makes the school day sound like an interrogation in which every answer is false. From here the poem narrows from "girls" to a single "she," and the setting is "Always secluded," a phrase that sits alone on its line. She watches the leaves fall "and lets the tears drop too." The tears join the autumn shedding, so nature becomes her only witness.
The poem then refuses to explain. "There is no specific reason for her tears." The pain is a "black hole" and "unattended cancer," and both images work through consumption, something drawing everything inward or eating "away at her insides." The word "unattended" carries a quiet accusation. If the illness grows unchecked, nobody is checking. Refusing to supply a cause is also the poem's argument: pain does not have to justify itself.
There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm here, only free verse. The lines lengthen and run on as the pressure builds, until the scream breaks through. The phrasing at that peak, "blood curdling screams of agony and torment," is the most familiar in the poem, and it tells us about suffering rather than showing it. The bandaids and bracelets do more with less. The scream is also a paradox: she "shrieks hoping someone will hear what she cannot say." It is a wordless message sent into an empty place. The text prints "creams" in the line that follows, almost certainly a slip for "screams," which "die down to whimpers."
The ending is the cruellest part. "And the leaves continue to fall" is short, calm and indifferent. It echoes the earlier leaves, so the poem closes where it began, with the world unchanged and nobody having come. Even the title, with its full stop, reads like a verdict with no appeal.
The poem matters because it speaks for the distress that hides behind competence and cheerfulness. It also puts an uncomfortable question to its school-age readers: what do we ask each other, and what answers do we accept? The girl's lie works only because the question is easy to accept. The poem's power lies in that gap, between what is asked and what is meant, between the laugh and the scream.