Young Writers Society

forgiveness.


if you counted up all the cracks i left in your skin after i forgot to water you for days and days
you would find the numbers stretching into infinity— something past endurance.
you still dig out all the jagged pieces of me left embedded inside your skull
things i didn't mean to leave behind, people i didn't mean to forget.
you carry all my memories in your backpack next to your spine.

even still the tips of your fingers can still trace my piano key ribcage with love
abandoned like madness on the side of the highway, scooped up in line at the grocery store
to you it doesn't matter where it spills out. you just are. love, i mean.
i only ever existed to make you part of me.
you only ever existed to grant me the leave to be myself and still love me for it.

we only ever existed so i could know what it felt like to be someone's oasis,
someone's last desperate pine tree in the middle of a forest no longer there.
so that you could know that craddling someone's soul in your hands was far greater of a justice than a soul ever deserved. than my soul ever deserved.

my sun is a hot one that leaves me an unforgiving wasteland.
i feel drenched in your moonlight that never was meant for me and find my way home anyway.

mad honey

the prayer of going nowhere, going nowhere.

i wonder what it would feel like, sometimes, to be you.
a walking, talking, real girl.
porcelain shoes on your feet and somewhere to go. no muddy soul left behind.

meanwhile, me and my muddy soul—
me and my useless hands have never been able to find a way to grasp things like you
how do i know if you are a hummingbird or a falcon
(how do i know if i'm the owl or the mouse)

it's kill or be killed. move your feet or draw your pistol.

isn't it funny how i can keep my eyes on you and still not notice that you have one foot out the door?
a truth i can't face and a door i won't open to the wind.
nothing gold can stay and your golden ichor turns to mad honey
even though the sign says safe to drink

my lips die before the rest of me does.
now that is a heart stopping kiss.

(for the record, i never planned on moving my feet past nowhere anyway).

@Euphory

i am my own worst enemy, unfinished

18+ for mentions of an active eating disorder

i've wanted to write a poem about your razor blade tongue for a long time.
the way it feels when you come home to behind my eyelashes when i am sleeping.
the snapping sound when you close the spider bone gate behind you, snick.
locked inside my skull with each thought trapped in a gnarled, sticky, clouded web.

there is a new shell for me to wake up in, new skin to shed before i go to sleep.
we are a body and when you are gone, ti's like i'm missing half myself.
i stand and watch you slowly cover everything i love with your body
until i am nothing but a shadow,
stuck in the nowhere inside of you. before i know it i am consumed.

i never swallowed anything but somehow i'm full of somebody else's poison.
i know it's your fault i count my bones like candy hearts and when i see them i am most happy.
it's not normal to want your skeleton on the outside of you like a caged animal.

i do not know why my eyes see things differently when you are here....

i am my own worst enemy, finished


i've wanted to write a poem about your razor blade tongue for a long time.
the way it feels when you come home to behind my eyelashes when i am sleeping.
the snapping sound when you close the spider bone gate behind you, snick.
locked inside my skull with each thought trapped in a gnarled, sticky, clouded web.

there is a new shell for me to wake up in, new skin to shed before i go to sleep.
i stand and watch you slowly cover everything i love with your body
until i am nothing but a shadow,
stuck in the nowhere inside of you. before i know it i am consumed.

i never swallowed anything but somehow i'm full of somebody else's poison.
i know it's your fault i count my bones like candy hearts and when i see them i am most happy.
it's not normal to want your skeleton on the outside of you like a caged animal.

i do not know why my eyes see things differently when you are here
all i know is that i will
finally like my body when it is no longer a body.
when you fold my brittle porcelain skin into smooth a paper thin letter
i will like the way my eyelashes shutter together to close
the way my heart's lamplight blinks out
the way my lungs putter to a stop on the side of a highway.

then i will ike my body and you will finally go home.

18+ for language and mature themes



things i love to do with you
sleep, eat, read, write, learn,
grow, kiss slow and languid and soft
fuck, sleep together, make love, make up, have sex,
finish each other's crescent shaped heart in a bed between sheets
fight, argue, disagree, have a tiff, howl at the moon below a sunkissed starship you built
all your letters and numbers and strings laced together in our intertwined fingertips.
talk, discuss, converse, communicate, reflect, remember
rewrite the stories of all our pasts until they are only the family of us (you, me, the dogs, and our little home, the budget that holds us together)
love, love, love, love, love

a letter to the mother of my teenaged self, edited

i am not coming home until the red ringed demons in your mouth take root in someone else’s dna and leave me the hell alone.

growing up i didn’t know that your ghost would walk in my skin every time i felt the earthquakes come shuddering through my bones. i had to learn that not everyone keeps memories of what happened to them like tattoos on their skin the same way that i do. not everyone makes themselves into cookie cutter shapes in order to be more appetizing.

your ghosts warns me that nobody will love me until i am like you.

(what i really needed to learn was that no one will love me until i am not h i n g like you.)

i will gentle you into submitting to who i am today, my full self not a broken daughter with as many flaws as freckles

and finally, you will tell me that the sunshine in my heart is your greatest pride and joy and that you’re sorry— sorry for all the times the soles of your feet on my spine stomp me into submission, tamp me down until i fit into something a little more appropriate, a little more lady like— a little less than i was before.

all i’ve ever wanted was to love.

i’ve never wanted the hate that grows (in) me—

poisons me from the inside and makes me rotten,
hollow,
forgotten.

all i’ve ever wanted was to love you. you, with your edges that leave paper cuts on my heart,
elementary school bruises flowering across my shoulders from being bent so deeply in half by my desire to still fit into your palms. to still fit into the shape you intended me to be.

i was never a shape. i am all consuming edges that cannot be tied down. you cannot snuff me out because i am inevitably part of you— you can’t go back now. you can see me as a mistake but i will see me as i truly am— a miracle.

where does this sorrow come from?
i can’t seem to swallow it no matter how hard i try
where did i get this all consuming loneliness?

they came from you. you who twined the doubt of knowing who i was supposed to be into my french braids.
making sure i’d always have to turn back north towards her to find my sense of direction.

i spent twenty years with my heart strings between my finger tips, trying to find some way to restring them so that i could finally figure out what you wanted me to be.
taking each puzzle piece of my soul out and finding where it fits into the dichotomy of you and i.

P.S.
as it turns out,
all the bitterness you fed me only made me more like me.

some musing on teenagers and the way they treat their bodies

years ago, too many boys used my body like a wasteland.
i didn't know any better, then. how their hands would leave craters in my spine
that would make standing, walking, talking— hard... sometimes.
you see for so many years people told me that my body was something meant to be saved
meant to be something, meant to mean something to somebody.
but nobody ever told me that somebody would be myself
that i needed to cherish my body or my body would not cherish me
that the biggest betrayer of yourself is often your self
and that my skin would eventually flake off
from lack of touch
if i didn't learn how to define touch by how it made me feel
instead of whether i felt like someone's attention was mine for long enough to make it worth it to sleep with him.

icarus 4.30.23

when i woke up this morning with my hands shaking
all i could think about was how van gogh ate yellow paint because he thought that was
the secret to happiness.
about how i kiss your lips as often as possible, because if yellow paint isn't the answer,
kissing you must be.

when i woke up this morning my lips were blue and numb from the cold you left.
you forgot your wings. i left you 40 voicemails to try and tell you that, but
instead i just kept saying how much i loved you.
i still haven't heard from you, so i think i'll keep them.
i hear is the wolves howling my name and i can't help but think it was you that
sent them to my door. how else did they learn who i was?
all i can think about is how

i wish i could wake up dead.

when i woke up this morning i felt my skeleton click back into place.
your wings no longer keep me warm so
i've had to start sleeping with my spine wrapped around me, a bone gate to keep out the noise
i can't stop thinking about those scars on your hand.
can't stop thinking about how you told me your love was like a religion.
can't stop thinking about how you promised you'd never leave me.
can't stop thinking.
the wolves have chewed through the ivory keyed fence.
i think they're coming for my heart next. i tried on your wings but they don't fit right.

when i woke up this morning with my heart no longer in my chest
i kept thinking about how lately, my medicine cabinet has been full of bullets, about how
i've been walking in my frosted dreams trying to find a way out— and how you haunt them.

i'm sorry i took your wings. i'm sorry the wolves tore them to shreds.


when i woke up this morning beside you with your hair tangled in my fingers.
the wolves were gnawing on your ribs.

you kissed my cheek and told me we were dead.

musings on teenagers who fancy themselves in love


i hope i never set foot in nebraska,
you write to me on the first summer you're gone.
i hope i never slip out from beneath the craddle of your two crescents,
i write back.
i want to taste your lips like a strawberry margarita,
you tell me through the phone wires the second summer after you leave.
i don't know what tequila tastes like but i know i could get drunk on you,
i say.

your laugh slips out in a bubble but
when i try to pop it my fingernail shatters against the glass.
suddenly ice cold ice cream drips down my spine.

you don't call me after that second summer.