Most monster stories are told by the people running away. Ebonee Grace's "Day 2: Monster" gives the voice to the creature instead, and what comes out is less a roar than a complaint, then a plea, then a cry. The title's "Day 2" suggests, though the text alone can't prove it, that the poem answers a daily writing prompt. Whatever its origin, it uses that prompt to ask who makes a monster, and who is responsible once it exists.
The opening quatrain sets out the grievance. "Many mothers have I / Many lives I lived" has an old-fashioned, inverted word order, like a line from a spell or a legend. The repeated "many" makes the speaker feel like a figure reborn in every new telling. It could also be read literally, as someone passed from one caregiver to another, and the poem leaves both readings open. The central protest follows: "I did not ask for this existence." The sentence is plain, almost a defendant's statement. The world's answer is violent: "People want me shivved." "Shivved" is rough slang for stabbing, and it clashes with the formal "existence" before it. The monster is hunted with a cheap, ugly weapon, and the clash of registers makes the mob seem small and mean.
The second quatrain turns inward. "I'm the color of sickness" never says which color, so each reader supplies their own. Then comes "I sicken even me," where the pun on "sick" shows the monster has swallowed the world's disgust. The next lines twist the idea of virtue: "The only grace I have / Is when people can't see." Grace here means beauty or elegance, and it also hints at forgiveness. For this speaker, the best that can be hoped for is invisibility. The rhyme of "me" and "see" binds the speaker's sense of self to the fear of being looked at.
The third quatrain is the barest. "Only silence answers my calls" is followed by the shortest, most direct line in the poem, "I need someone," which has no imagery at all, only need. Then "Red runs down my hands" brings the poem's one vivid action. The blood might belong to a victim or to the speaker, and the poem doesn't say. That ambiguity is the point, because guilt and injury have run together. "Mercy for me is none" inverts the syntax again, so it sounds like a verdict. The rhyme does quiet work here: "someone" and "none" sit in matching positions, so the plea and its refusal are chained together by sound.
Structurally, the poem has fourteen lines, built as three quatrains and a couplet, which gives it the shape of a sonnet. The lines are short and uneven, though, closer to a chant of about four beats than to the long line of a formal sonnet. In each quatrain only the second and fourth lines rhyme (lived/shivved, me/see, someone/none), so the odd lines hang unanswered, like the calls the monster makes. Only in the closing couplet do two rhymes sit side by side: "My creator dies / I'm left with my cries." Here the sound finally closes up, but the meaning does the opposite. The one being who might have explained or defended the monster is gone, and all that remains is its own voice. "Cries" means both weeping and shouting, and the nursery-rhyme bounce of the rhyme makes the grief sound childlike, which is harder to bear.
The poem matters because it reverses the usual point of view and still refuses an easy comfort. Readers may think of Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*, where a made creature is abandoned by its maker, but the poem needs no such reference. In only fourteen short lines it sets "mothers" and "creator" against "shivved" and "red," and so asks whether the monstrous act or the abandonment came first. It ends without rescue. Nobody answers, nobody forgives, and the reader is left in the silence the speaker has been describing all along.