Young Writers Society

...What's with that moon avvie? I feel this is the first we've seen each other outside of chat.

if I’d told you
this was not a love story—
would you still
make promises for two?

(tell me something accurate)

(I know this is not
what falls under your definition
of ideal,
but I gave you the nine of swords
instead of the world—
only some of the blame is mine. The truth is we
are comets dreaming darkly
and our fiery tales are burning up the firmament
in the only way we know
how to keep warm)

the only way to
look objectively at the past
is through a helioscope
of everything that went wrong.

(These ochre colored glasses mean
four times out of five
i will hear you say “i think you should walk
the road less traveled
while I keep to the path”,
when what you were really telling me was
“stay”.)

i am a creature of fire and stone—
a parenthetical of wrath
whose name begins with envy
and concludes
with thorns threaded through my hair.

I have dreamt of being soft (A creation of edges
that do no harm—)
but the truth
is I am a forged weapon
and I am only indulgent
when I remember what it was like
to taste your skin.

(there is always someone who argues
To let the minotaur out of the labyrinth, but
we never could rebuild ourselves from the inside out
unless we prepare to detonate,
and every other choice
is always better when faced
with burying yourself alive.)

(I have already buried myself alive for you.
I will not do it again.)

all the soothsayers were wrong
and this is the true end. rest
easy now, darling—(but do not put
down your sword). In peace there is
an aftermath and the aftermath is a snake
eating its tail—(this is what I know about snakes:
the point at which they call you a deceiver is
when you should gird your loins, sunshine,
because shit’s gonna get rough).

(but shit’s been rough
for a while now, hasn’t it?
because this is what it looks like to live like an asteroid—
we couldn’t pick smooth sailing out of a lineup
even if it wore your man’s favorite shirt and
whispered ‘there, sweetheart, all the soothsayers
were wrong and this is the true end.’)

but we were warned and
this is what happens when you swallow the arcana
and are reborn as a star—
you bleed holy knowledge when cut
and to live like that
is a sword through the heart
that never quite gets hilt-deep.
it is almost over, you are told.
it is always almost over.
it is always the truest end.

(and sweetheart, there are
a thousand true ends. we will have the
strength to see three and a half of them.)

surely when you told me
absolution is only a train crash
away
you didn’t mean for my hungry mouth
to swallow another chance
and leap a second time.
(redoes and retries
are all I have ever wanted from the world. even when you
promised me dwarf planets and antonyms to all my sins
I dug myself a grave in another body
and went to the back of the line.)

god—
I have built a thousand prayers
In my bones but they all
taste like
someone else’s marrow.

we collided in a tangle of candlewax
and coral,
bark mulch and
rosary beads.
(car crash statistics are not the
Only mark of a protagonist.
in the end it only matters if you
were the one behind the wheel
and if it was my foot on the gas.)

In the interim
of a hell bent whirlwind
made of steel and bone
i learned the names of gods worried
out of your context
and patchwork quilted into mine—
who only pick up the phone when
I’m finally lost in the sea of myself. desperate
for divinity and daydreams
where what you coaxed from my throat
was spectrum for closure
instead of an asylum for ghosts.

(my heart is a birdcall
regurgitating wilderness
in an urban ribcage. I am not built
for fire,
yet I am wholesome as an inferno,
an elegy for mishapen things.)

I long to be a
vicious lover with
restless eyes and worried hands—
but we are solitary diviners of wrist bone
and cartilage.

(you told me my bones smelled like
An apocalypse after rain, tender-soaked,
A high rise for mistakes.)


This is the downfall for vicious lovers:
we will bury you with our roots and build
houses between your knees. We will eat the stars off
of your chest. We will always
be built for leaving.

(the fastest way to purge the land
is to sink it in salt and turn me loose.)

this is what it feels like:
i am a dropped teacup at 3:17
in the morning,
when my heart is too tired to
see anything but stars
and roses in my periphery
(you have argued them to be
supernovas and
lilies-of-the-valley
and I have told you that
where I stand there is little
to no difference when
they all spell out d e c a y.) (it was
this that prompted you
to stop spiking my morning coffee with
cyanide and technicolor daydreams—
because what good is a girl who can’t
even keep one foot on the ground
when she’s elbow deep in somebody
else’s excavation?)

(this is what it
feels like: i am a broken teacup
dropped to the floor
at 3:21 in the morning,
anchored in a bed of
nightshade and black holes,
desperate to see a sunrise
that hasn’t been carved
out of someone else’s name.)

i have built you from spring—
conjured you into existence by
my cold muddy heart (because this
is the part I forget about: the taste
of creation is a sour eclipse I can’t
embrace without swallowing cherry
blossoms for anesthetic.)

i have rescued you from summer—
coalesced from a honeybee harddrive
where sights and sounds are hidden
files in translation. (your skin has
lost its splendor and now
all I smell is the hot red impact
of a fist hitting bone)

i have destroyed you in autumn—
because the sound of dying leaves
remind me too much of our last
conversation (where my every word
was splattered silver and pleading,
and your only crimson reply was “no”.)

i have buried you in winter—
but it is here where I will take
your place, and
cosign my name to all
your insistent misgivings. I will take
my sparrow’s heart
and put it to ground
and hope for better crops
(I have never
told you this is where you belong,
but I have eaten enough lies in
my life to know when words
are past their date).

i have never died in this space—
here i am a linear expanse
with a forgotten escape route. how
can i tell you how this feels?
‘this is your brain. this is your
brain with wolves for synapses’.
(i have never
seen the point of early risings to beat
the tide. we are circular beings, even
if we are compelled toward the things
that make us bleed.)