Bio
Aaron Aquilina is an academic with the University of Malta's Department of English. His book 'The Ontology of Death' has been published with Bloomsbury (2023), and his work on poetry, prose, and literary theory has been published in various journals and edited collections. He has also published some poetry, with his latest poems appearing in the 'International Human Rights Arts Journal' and 'Stand' (2024). He is the founding general editor of 'ANTAE', an online journal of creative writing that has been active since 2013 (https://www.um.edu.mt/antae/).
Aaron Aquilina
What Counts?
She passed me twice while
I waited for the bus, counting time:
cocooned in the sleeve of a woolly coat,
her hand twice covered half her face,
hiding it from mine.
She was no more than ten, I'm sure,
still a fraction of who she will become –
attempting, though failing, to keep invisible
the scarred and twisted half of her:
which was, to her, her sum.
Child! I wanted to scream,
don't you know how grotesque the rest of us are,
with not a single decent side?
How our ugliness lies so deep, so invisible,
we couldn't hide it if we tried?