Young Writers Society

1.

the night is young when we all get there.
it’s still listening to us, even after we get past the obligatory greetings
and dive into the words that unlock our lips once we’ve loosened them a little.
the scene is blurry, like vintage film, and tomorrow
none of us will remember the way the light bent around the glass
or fractured on the carpet we fell onto.
but for now, we choke on our secrets, cough them up
and forget to reel them back, leaving them as easy bait
to snag on and snatch our flaws in plain sight later.

2.

two hours and a thousand confessions later, three of us have cried.
we aren’t running out of things to share,
and we started off strong, with the beauty queen
who’s way out of everyone’s league sobbing over a heartbreak
that is and wasn’t and would have been none of my business.
she’ll still comfort the girl who admitted she wants a nose job
and she’ll say that watching her mother’s battle over her own beauty
made her insecure about her face too,
but she’ll pause in the middle of a sentence where she was going to lie
about being over what she internalized from that self-hatred.
we noticed. it’s like— we know.
we know. we know how love swallows you whole
and spits you out once bitten, twice shy
and tells you to take a look at yourself.

3.

and i think i stumbled into a room too dark—
or just one that was hard to come back out of—
because ten minutes later it’s my turn to cry under neon
and i want so badly for my tears to be perfect, so i perform at grief,
i stain the couch cushions beautifully. i was loved,
and i’ve still got to deal with that. i was loved,
and it made me more brittle. i want to crack my heart down the middle
and see how it reflected me, but that’s happened already.
tonight’s not for putting it back together.

4.

i sob on someone’s shoulder and they tell me my hair is soft
as they run a hand over it comfortingly and it’s all i’ve ever wanted to hear.
i trace a smiling face in the carpet with my finger
and imagine it on my lips. i imagine my lips as anything other
than split, pair it with eyes that are bright with anything other
than tears. look, there’s things i haven’t mourned yet
and i don’t want to get to them all here. this is a party.
these are my friends. i have to trust this shoulder
because i’m crying on the floor of their room
and that’s got to be friendship. that’s got to be something,
because without it, i’d be collapsed on the ground
and that’s not how i want to fall.

5.

in the weak morning i drag myself up by the nails, dig up my bones
and leave the party, but i’m not sure i actually do.
i could still be pinned under florescent secrets,
still listening to the beauty queen’s closet skeletons, still shored up
on someone’s shoulder, still clutching at the carpet like a life raft.
i think i’m not drowning, but i still feel the river in my lungs.
i feel guilty of pulling the party in with me, but then we all sunk into it
because we all felt heavy. i’m waterlogged,
and so are these eyes, but i must be ready to close them.
i must be ready to leave this behind.

you had this story you liked sharing
about the first time i went to visit you—

i was obsessed with the ambulances we saw
on the drive there when you picked me up,

drawn to their lights like the other kind of sirens,
fitted with a better understanding of violent delights

at age three than i have now in wiser years,
but it's all starting to come back to me.

you drove me out later just so we could pass the hospital again,
and whatever i was looking for, i must have found it, because

it looked to you like i was having the best day of my life.
i would have a bad one there after years of us both growing old,

stranded in those barren white emergency rooms,
but back then, it must have been you and me in the car,

listening to the sounds of red and blue, with youthful laughter
spreading across all lanes of traffic, covering those killjoy stop signs.

in a few weeks, i will see you rose-covered.
after that, i will never see you again.

here, the water is desperately blue in shades
you’ll wish to suffocate in, with smoke
you’ll want to make part of your lungs.
here, there are stars, but you won’t want
to find them: the trees will steal your attention
before your gaze travels that high and then bury it
underneath their roots where all the other secrets go.
here, i don’t even mind that the wind tore the sunglasses
from my face— it was doing me a favor anyway,
making every color devastatingly bright in my vision. and here,
i could even get used to telling you how far apart
our hearts are in kilometers, every day, on every high tide.

(for a class slam poetry project)



at a weekend campfire, you find it fitting to mention to us that
saturday is a word the color of the flames— orange,
but with promises of gold woven through to brighten it up.
we learn about other orange things too, like vivaldi’s music,
massachusetts, the letter g, and the direction east.
very few things are purple, you tell us, just the number four
and girls’ names ending with y. we ask about our names,
and i learn my other friend’s name is lime green, but navy blue
in the longer form of it that we never call him. mine is like
the red of the shirt i’m wearing, she claims, only more wine-dark.
hers is a soft turquoise, almost melting into an overhead moon gray.

i dream that i wake up that night and shake her out of sleep, asking
what color is love? she responds that love is the color of stars
and before i can ask if she means white or gas-flame blue
or the red of a sun death, she taps each of the freckles on my face,
drawing constellation lines before pointing to the brown of my eyes
and saying love, love, love. i didn’t get to ask for her interpretation,
but if the pain of knowing something was a dream had a color,
i’d say it was the black tucked behind closed eyelids.