Young Writers Society

dig a ditch, six feet deep

it's not like i wanted to die.
i just thought you might find me more interesting
with more blood on my outside than my inside.

you didn't find any version of me interesting, though,
did you?
i tore apart pieces of me and stitched them in other places to see what you thought
when my nose was on my forehead and my heart was on my sleeve.

you told me to go change, my shirt made me look frumpy.

figures.

all you ever write about is sex and killing yourself

you are tired.
you're not hungry, but you eat anyway because
that's what you must do to stay alive.
we tell you these things, in therapy.
nutrition is key to being happy healthy and healed.
you are none of these things.

you are the space between my thoughts
you are the space between my thighs
you are the space between everything that is good and supposed to happen
and everything ruined and black and ugly.

you are tired.
you tell the same story over and over again
about the first time you saw your dad cry,
sitting in the middle of a hospital cafeteria in nowhere ohio.
you always mention that you were eating green jello and i don't get it because--
who's favorite flavor of jello is green?

you are the space between your thoughts,
you are the space between your thighs,
you are the space between where everything fits together
and where everything falls apart.

self care is so mundane.
everything bloody just turns out to be red.

how do you like your blue eyed boy, mister death? pt. 2

a hospital room.
two bodies.
one alive, desperately wishing to be dead.
one almost dead, desperately wishing to be alive.
the alive person sees the person dying and wants to save them
wants to cut out their own heart and sew it into the dead to make them breathe again.
the dying just wants a sip of water.
neither speaks.
one forgot how, one shouldn't, both can't.
the sound of mickey mouse clubhouse plays in the background.
nobody's listening to anything but the beeps that are too slow.

there are two bodies.
both of them die surrounded by get well cards and extra pokemon toys.

how do you title a poem about death

no one talks about children dying.
point blank. full stop.
it's miserable, it's unbearable, it's hateful, it's morbid it's--
i don't like thinking about it either.
the end.
full stop.
a upended choo choo train forgotten under a hospital bed--
whatever.
i don't want to think about it anymore.

no one teaches young souls of loss


dear professor,
in your psych class, my freshman year of college
we talked a lot about the way people react to dying.
the stages of grief, what that means, how they happen.
we didn't talk about these three things, though.
so, professor, this is my complaints, written in alphabetical order and in bullet points.
because your class did not prepare me for the real world, and i'm very upset.



1. denial
we didn't talk about how there would be times
too many to count, actually,
where i would pick up my phone.
dial a number that doesn't exist
call a person no longer there.
just to tell them hello.
in my head, two months is too long
too fucking long to go without hearing a voice of someone
as alive as they are.

2. anger
we didn't talk about how there are days when the sun shines so goddamn bright
my eyes start to cry.
i don't even mean them too.
i just look up and i know that i have to live for thousands of more days
standing right there, on that pavement, my head turned to the sky
it pisses me off.
why did i have to be the one to get left on a planet where the sun shines?

3. bargaining
we didn't talk about how every day i would think a million times to myself
i would pay a total of a trillion dollars to go back.
just for 5 minutes.
i would sell my soul
just for a minute.
do you know what a minute is to someone who has an infinite amount of them?
nothing.
do you know what a minute is to someone who's about to lose their reason for counting?
everything.
shake your head all you want, i wouldn't change my choices.
one more i love you is worth forty more years in my book.

4. depression
we didn't talk about how on nights like tonight
when i should be doing my homework (for your class, sorry)
i would sit in the shower for an hour
head down
just because i got too tired to stand.
how when i got up i had to put all my vertebrae back in place
one right after another, my thoracic spine twisting back to be where it's supposed to be.
so i can be a citizen with straight a's who's claim to fame is the dean's list.

5. acceptance
this one is bullshit.


so it's not in alphabetical order, sue me.
yours truly.

LadySpark, you have a lot of variety here, but I appreciate the strong voice (at times with some attitude and sassiness) of the narrator throughout your pieces. #25 is just poignant and heartbreaking. It really mimics the thought process of going through thinking about something so morbid, how you want to talk about it, but you just can't for whatever reason. Interesting work!

So you didn't quite hit thirty (unless you were planning on going on a last-second binge like I did ) but I think you win anyway because these are so heart-wrenching and just plain good.