Young Writers Society

Excitement bleeds into fear as I sit staring at the wall
the phone pressed to my ear.
I want to run around the block each and every time I hear the fatal tone.
I want to play Red Light with the monotonous warbling
or maybe Russian Roulette is a better way to say that each time I hear it
I know I'll live for another few seconds, anticipating
endlessly biting, waiting, for that sound of another human
on the other end.
The world should just break them all and throw them away
let's go back to mail so at least that's only once a day.

a long ____ down.

i will fall
and i will keep my wits about me
so i can masquerade --
but not that; it's too lavish...

i will fall and
i will keep my wits about me
so i can move unrecognized
and unremarkable
in the bad parts of town where
the buildings are all just one story high.

i will have the easy chair my aunt had --
her cigarette smoke and the tear
from where i caught here and my uncle --
everything is still there.

i will become still life
and keep all my pears in one bowl,
pockmarked from where she popped pimples.

i will not fear my ugly child.

i am crawling back to sink my hands in with my roots.

midnight with the camera in my bathroom
and the night light opening worlds in my mirror.
a bluff in the ceramic near
where toothpaste foam falls from my lips
and still they won't stop watching.
and still: night vision.

mine is of the picture in my bedroom
i don't want them to know i look at.

goodbye.

euphony is the wind through my bathroom
as it chills the tiles in the morning.
i am gooseflesh and nothing until the gush from the pips
that means later I'll pick off the rust from my skin.

he was the one who checked for leaks
in the corner of the unfinished basement.

he was on the one who left me voluminously peeling
my own socks off at night
until my breathing is labored
and I no longer want a memory.

I will leave him to be swept out
with the wind in my bathroom.

why don't they start like this?

what is a ski slope in summer?

sounds like the set up to a neat joke,
but why don't they start:

have you ever been to a ski slope in summer?
did you lose your virginity yet?
why didn't you ask for a rape kit, kid?

i answer:

the ground wasn't slippery enough
and
i shiver when winter comes.

the hunted

brown-backed doe lost her
white to the winter
and rose from the mud
from her knees to her feet
just in time for the end of the world
in fire
and charred grass.

spilling

i mark time on a ruler
and i won't last seven meters
i won't last
i am marking centimeters, millimeters, nanometers.
but they are gone more quickly
than i can think the numbers,
than i can comprehend.

i am always with my finger on the pause button,
but time goes faster
when my mother sweeps the floors for me.

at a gas station i buy measuring tape
and a coffee for the road.

a blue bird breaks
the kitchen window
with his beak
and sleeps in the sink.

i run water over him
to see when he starts bleeding.

my mother asks if i ever learned to swim.

six meters, 10 centimeters, 55 millimeters, 126 nanometers.

confessions i do not want to hear

hallways make echos long and thin
like they haven't eaten or been drunken in days.

you are beneath the arch
of the prism's tail
and you shout to me
what you've always needed to say

off the walls: euphony.

i am tugged by the undertow
as the glass breaks.

voluminously.
expectedly.
shards and shredded echos.

and a gush of silence.

(afterward, you are nowhere to be seen.
afterward, i walk across rainbows
as the sun rises at last.)

i am so far gone,
that i wrote
"chesapeake baby"
in my notes, and it was
the funniest
thing
I have ever
seen.

(Just a random poem).

I know you're hiding something
The question here is why?
When we've been through nearly everything
But all you do is lie.
And now you say you're leaving me
For safety
I am left behind
I know you're running from something.
'cause there's nowhere left to hide
You sure didn't keep me waiting
you left me with notes by my side
No goodbyes
But I've already said them haven't I?

Things my grandma says
come and go in the breeze,
over the fan she never likes
having on. Tumbling out
she says; when i was fourteen,
my mother said to me,
all men are liars. and it is right.
and how her friend died next to her
on the train one monday,
and no one noticed
for two stops.
My grandma says to me
things my mother never heard
and things she's said before
and I love to listen.
Maybe one day,
I will write them down.

my mother believes enough in pot
to call it medicine,
but did not have the courage to suggest
that her own mother try it
when she was wasting away from cancer.

my mother sat in the bedroom
of the woman who gave birth to her,
and out of embarrassment sidestepped a chance to
give her back her appetite, to give her strength.

and so i do not call my mother on her birthday
and so i swallow pills made of chemicals
and so i keep in all the anger she ever told me to let go.

If you want to love me,
surrender and withdraw.
Leave me to the things
that bury inside my soul.

Listening to the voices of the world.
And watching the eyes
that often stop and stare
at me.
The oddity.
Sometimes I want close my eyes
and pretened I do not know
that their watching me.
And whispering
behind my back.
But still I march on
to the drumbeats of the world.

I was strong once.
I took books home from the library
by Louisa May Alcott
that told stories of helpful brownies
doing the dishes or
washing the toilet for the third or fourth time
like their nasty step mothers asked them to,
and so I took the sponge from the kitchen sink
and scrubbed back behind the water bowl
until the skin on the top of my hand rubbed off
and I could leave blood wedged in between the tile.