Young Writers Society

xv.

a million ways to die


sometimes you wish that you could chose the way you die.
you sit in bed and you consider it, hard, for hours,
and you decide you'd want to drown.
you'd want to paint yourself blue
melt into the ocean
and let him swim in you one last time.

when he leaves you change your mind--
you want to die, wrapped in tongues of fire
because you're a firework no one can handle,
you're the explosion everyone's waiting for.
there's not poetry in fire, it's just hot
and there'll be nothing of you left.

the fourth time he calls you that night,
you open your windows, even though it january
and decide that you want to freeze to death instead.
slow, like going to sleep, and everyone will find you with your lips
painted blue, and your cheeks painted red, and your eyelashes dancing with snow flakes.

when he calls again you answer the phone and decide this is the way you want to die
talking to the only person in the world, who couldn't love you back.

xvi.

//.

i break the things i touch
so i've learned not to touch anything
to sit with my legs crossed and hands clasped
like the lady i am.
i broke you and couldn't stop the shattering sound
couldn't stop your crying
couldn't stop the world from spinning too fast and making me lose my balance.
i was always balanced before you came along.
i never knocked into anything, i knew my place.

i might have shattered your world,
but you shattered mine first.

xvii.
my not so world shattering love.


the first heart you break is never the one you thought it'd be.
when you imagine who's heart you'll break, you imagine Johnny,
and his sweet expression after you kissed his cheek under cherry blossom rain.

you don't imagine the boy with his jacket that smells like sunshine
with his cigarettes that paint you pretty pictures with their smoke.
you don't imagine his car with the big backseat, or his whispers and scars
i'm a broken toy no one wants to mend.
you don't imagine him because you counted his freckles in the frosted morning
sunshine, and you sang after he kissed you for days, spun around your kitchen,
said, this is it, this is real, this is love.

this is not love. this is you counting the hours between kisses
waiting till the hours stretch on for infinity
so you never have to say i have your world shattering love broken at my feet.
he never lets you go on without a kiss and you can't even leave without
his lips on your wrists and neck and hands and feet and he just wants you
all your hatred spoonfed to you by someone who thinks it's love.

so it's suicidal love that crashes and burns on your front step-- and of course you have to clean it up
so it's red, swollen and gross but you pick it up anyway
and almost puke because his eyes are pools you could drown yourself in.
here is his world shattering love, soggy and drowned in need of CPR.

You don't know how to give CPR, so you just leave it there on the concrete
and hope the sun dries it out.

xviii.

why humans should hate god.

i played god again, darling.
i pretended i could breathe
to make the flowers outside your window start growing
and make you stop crying, maybe.
i thought maybe if i pretended i could stop the world from spinning
you'd stop eating your own heart out and then
hiding it beneath my lips or under my tongue so i couldn't speak.
i thought if i was doing something good,
doing something because my love is wilder than an ocean
nothing bad would happen to you.
i was wrong.
i'm sorry i played god, baby.
your sheets are soaked in blood and your washer isn't working
so i'll try and get the stains out in your sink
even if the muddy water makes my hands dry.

xix.

the turtle and the hare.

before you left the swing on my back porch broke.
maybe it was a sign that we were going to fall apart,
rusted metal torn from rusted metal.
i walked outside the next morning, cup of cold coffee in my hand,
hair a mess because
we had another fight and i had to spend an hour kissing you better
and saw the yellow stain on the white washed wood.
i knew then you would be leaving me
and i didn't even turn around and try to stop you.

before you left i wrote a letter to the ex you hate
to let them know that i was
really over them and i didn't dream of them ever
and since i can't control my dreams that really means
i'm not thinking about them, doesn't it?
i didn't show you the letter and slipped into the mailbox
right after i left for work because i knew you'd hate
the little turtle i drew in the corner of the envelope
where the return address is supposed to go.

i'm disapointed because that turtle meant a lot to me
i like turtles, you see
they're soft and even if they move slowly they get there eventually
maybe instead of calling you i'll get a turtle instead and name it after you.

that wouldn't make sense though, because you're nothing like a turtle
you're the speed of light and soft kisses rolled together inside maple leaves
and the smell of autumn.
you're everything i never said and the wrong words that spilled out
because i thought you were someone else.
i'm sorry i got confused.

i'm sorry i moved slowly trying to keep up with you.


the morning you left i sat on the broken porch swing
that had fallen to the ground because it's chain
really was only as strong as it's weakest link
and cried.

xx.

last night i finally opened that box of chocolates you bought
as an apology for sleeping with that slut from accounting.
they were stale and filled with all the wrong things.



i only ate one and then i threw the box away because
even knowing you'd touched it was enough to make a girl throw up
and it didn't take much for me to be sick.



last night i called you and told you i hated you
and you said i was a bitch and when i told you to come over
i didn't really mean it, but you don't even know me well enough
to not listen when i talk, because i always say the wrong thing
and you're the wrongest thing i've ever done.

xxi.

for sale: one bed.

you told me we could live on love
and we didn't need anything else.

xxii.
i remember every breath you ever took.

i don't remember much
but i do remember walking
for hours, and how my feet cramped up
and you told me suck it up, buttercup
and i had to hide the tears from you because
i had been walking my entire life and i just wanted to
stop and look at the stars and hold your hand.

i don't remember much but i do remember you
force laughed at everything i said
even if it wasn't funny
and that hurt my feelings a little bit
but i hid the tears from you anyway because
i had been talking my entire life
and no one ever thought i was funny till you.

i don't remember much but i do remember
how glassy your eyes were every single time
i kissed you, and how your breath smelled like
mint leaves and someone else's tongue.
i hid my tears from you anyway because
i had been loving everyone my entire life
and no one ever loved me back till you.

xxiii.

you are a jigsaw i can't quite figure out

we haven't talked in
awhile, and i spend every day walking
between rotting railroad
tracks, and getting stuck in your
doorways, searching for the reasons why my lips
are blue and my belly is fat with the secrets you
stuffed in there to keep warm.

you told me
i hate the smell in the air before it rains
and i hate the sound of blankets rubbing together
when you first wake up in the morning.
i locked all these things away in my brain,
right behind my eyelashes to make sure
i didn't forget what your eyes looked like
when you were telling me important things.
even though you're gone i still watch those moments
on replay in my head, just to make sure they're still there.


i stuck my heart in a fist shaped
dent in our bathroom floor for
safe keeping, whispered that i'd be back
soon, and went looking for your ghost. i
never found you but i found where you hid
every piece of me that's been missing since you
left.

xxiv.

here is my problem with love


this is my problem with love:
it never stops.
first you see someone in a bar,
and you think they're cute
so you talk to them and then you tumble
into bed and the next morning you're married
and the next week you're dying side by side,
hands clasped together.

i told you i didn't want to date you
and you laughed and said you were very dateable anyway.
so i bit your bottom lip to make you moan and watched your hair
shimmer in the sunset.
you told me you don't believe in having sex in bed so
we got creative, and the next morning i woke up by myself,
a blanket wrapped around me and a note stuck to my forehead
that i was an idiot, because there's my love, hanging haphazardly
from a chair where it got thrown on accident.
i didn't mean for this to happen, but goddammit,
it did.

xxv.

they call you home, sometimes.

right before you fall asleep, you hear them.
the mountains call you home, and sometimes,
you even cry because good god, you miss them.
the places between the creeks and rivers,
where valleys wait to cradle you to sleep sing to you,
but the lullabies not the same when you're in a city
where no one even knows your name.
you can almost taste the honeysuckle
but when you wake up in the morning you realize it was just
stale coffee from yesterday morning.
there's memories hidden behind your eyelashes and sometimes
you play them before you fall asleep, because the creak
of porch swings might be the most beautiful lullaby you've ever heard.
but you wake up from your dream when you count the stars outside
your window, and realize they're not fireflies.

xxvi.
all this and love will end

sweetheart, we can make it if we're lucky.
if we wait for the stars to align before we kiss,
if wait for the soft bubble of a giggle and then seal the deal,
we can make it.
i've been holding my breath around you because i don't want to ruin
your silence, i know how important it is to you.
you're soft and broken and i try to understand that every time
you pull away when i try to hold your hand.
it's hard, darling, but i'll do it for you.
i'll do anything for you.
maybe it was silly, to throw away my future with both hands--
all for a boy with a smile like sunshine, and eyes like a drowning river.
but it was worth it, and i never want the way your cheek feels against
my lips to end, so i keep kissing you even when you pull away.

darling, we can make it if we're lucky.
with a whole lot of love, i can make you a prince,
and i will be your queen and everything will stop putting us
between a rock and a hard place.
i don't know how i know this, but i do.
your eyelashes will stop catching your tears
and i will kiss them away instead,
and our feet will turn to sand, and we won't even care
that we have to stand still,
because we're allowed to hold hands and that's all i ever wanted anyway.




i promise, dear, we can make it if we're lucky.