Katia Dermott

Short of Stability

​My room always smelt of cigarette
                                        smoke and lavender.
Books and mismatched socks strewn the floor–
                     all my belongings visible in a five-by-five glance.
             Goodwill bags scarcely filled
                                                       the cupboard under our sink.

My mom’s boyfriend traded ice cream for my dolls
                        because they portrayed the wrong
                                                               body image, and I was left
              to play with books and mismatched socks. When they became
                            too threadbare, I juggled the Goodwill bags until they blew
                                                                   out of my reach.

For my birthday I got concert tickets to a band I didn’t even
                            like and I watched my father slip a fifty
             to the dealer behind the bathroom. I couldn’t afford
                         my graduation dress that year, so
                                      I taped the tags to my back.

                         The year we got a puppy was the year
we couldn’t pay our mortgage. Fifteen thousand
                                                                                              short
                            of stability.




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Katia Dermott, a high school senior in New Hampshire, is an aspiring writer and photographer. She hopes to work with human rights in the future, but for now writes mostly personal pieces that reflect on human interaction with the world. Katia believes writing is a form of art intended to be interpreted, understood, and liked in many different ways, never with a single style for a single piece. She’s received Scholastic Art & Writing awards and has been published by the Putney School as well as in the literary magazine Layman’s Way.