The poem “Graveyard Mouth” by Julia Trujillo is beautiful. Everything is incredibly clear and descriptive. Each line creates a stunning mental image, mostly of “the dark-eyed girl” that lives inside the narrator’s mouth. The poem conveys a hard-to-explain emotion, especially in lines fourteen to sixteen. The poem reads, “God, I wish I knew how to believe, that between the two of us, she is the evil one.” The girl is harming the narrator and making her upset, but the narrator still blames herself for the girl’s actions.

I interpreted “the dark-eyed girl” to be the narrator’s negative/intrusive thoughts. The girl is constantly criticising the narrator using “sharp words, like broken glass” and tells the narrator says that she’s disgusting and hurts her. The narrator describes her mouth as a graveyard and says that the girl, along with future and past thoughts, will soon be swallowed. To me, this means that the narrator tends to bottle up her negative emotions and doesn’t express them healthily. This poem is full of metaphors and was very interesting to read.