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an open space for youth writing & mental health discussion
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 I. growth
when i met you, you were a garden of bounty where nature reigns superior and, around you, i could lose myself in the skies kissed golden and trees intermingled with the stars above, i could melt into a tornado of rose petals and stars divine; i could sink into the throes of savage passion.  He is a knotted mess of nerves
limping under the full moon. Plans have bloomed behind his eyes for him to fall back with the tide.  for the longest time, the years after i left us
things changed: the sweets jar was always empty. hollow. it was a curse--every candy i tried would taste like headlights that evening  it’s been six years since my
parents have read my writing. my mother doesn’t mention my poetry anymore; she hates my selective memory. she says that i  [Content warning: mentions of self-harm, depression]
i. there is a mermaid in the bathroom, and her alabaster heart splays moondust on the tiles. i find iridescent tears clogging the drain / unconsciously, my fingers reach out to clutch / beauty in its final moments, reveries / fluttering like decaying butterflies to a sky / with opened arms.  i wonder why girls have to be broken to be beautiful
and why boys wait to be fixed by hands that can barely hold their own weight he calls me at night and i can hear the candied, the crushed, the syrup dripping from his lips slurred words that shouldn’t feel this soft but they do, and there will be time to repent when the sun comes up  if only these chipped bones would feel
something bigger than breath chafing broken-elevator lungs, the thistles prickling in wait under my skin. cast a fishing line into sullied consciousness and you’ll find shards of sea glass, ennui eroded until it shines like something beautiful.  Jesus
my prayers chant before dawn cross shine pure like morning sun my deep piety prompts hands to grip like mussels scorching breathing floating above stubborn clavicle weep within my wonder Your Bible of my profanity  I. The Goldcutter
Most people remember my mother for one thing: her golden hair. Everyone used to treat it like it was something to behold, but I’ve always thought hair was hair and that was it. Then again I wasn’t blessed with Mother’s blondeness, or her beauty for that matter, as both Mother and the other neighborhood matrons have been keen to point out.  In the slender branches of an oak tree, a small songbird alighted gracefully, the branch trembling slightly under its tiny feet. The wind whispered as the bird’s eyes darted around, scanning its surroundings. Suddenly, the bird lifted its head, letting a melody pour from its throat: four short, gentle notes, followed by a rapid trill. The bird paused, looked around, and then repeated the melody.
 some days, your name
is the most terrifying thing i know. i don't dare write it, i don't dare utter a stronger, deadlier word. i have plucked my heart's contents like flower petals, gave i love you's away like flyers — i did not know the difference between reckless and careless  [Content warning: depression, suicide ideation]
i'm counting the ceiling lights of my therapist's waiting room until my eyes hurt. 37. who even puts an odd number of lights on the ceiling? oh. 3 of them don't work anymore. 40 ceiling lights is too many. it's as if they're there to pierce through the bodies of the clinically depressed 19 year old, the PTSD-struggling 10 year old who can't talk about anything but the evening someone set his house on fire, the 37 year old who just found out her husband of 10 years was cheating on her, the 14 year old with anger management issues who tears the catalogues about mental health to pieces in front of everyone, the 48 year old man who always sits there pretending he's there to pick someone up & not here to talk about his pattern of either loving weak women or weakening the women he loved & the 24 year old woman who was caught kissing someone & is here to be 'talked' into 'maintaining' her 'chastity'.  it was one of those family dinners hosted on humid summer nights, everyone gathered around the table; filling their plates with the chicken tikka & chicken seekh kebabs Baba drove 4kms to bring home, spilling some mint yoghurt chutney here, a little imli sauce there, aunty distributing quarters of naan around, the hiss of cola bottles opening, the air thick with the scent of barbecue & freshly sliced onions, everyone talking over each other, snippets of conversation floating above the nusrat fateh ali khan music playing from our old speakers. a stack of cassettes piled on top of it.
each cassette had two sides. A & B. i've always noticed that side B was unexpected & completely different from side A. i don't know why that was, but it was intriguing. i always waited for side A to end so i could flip the cassette to a different side, one that had nothing to do with its former playlist.  I think on paper. My mouth does not open. Words aren’t pretty when they’re syllables hung in the air, they only look good in petite Times-New-Roman rows. When they tumble off your tongue they feel displaced. They don’t mean what you mean. They’re loose strings of thought, incoherent and irrelevant, not even close to the muscular ropes that tie all of your anxieties up in one concise, consistent character flaw, which for all your perceptiveness you can’t see. Stop annotating yourself and let the ropes unravel. Your brain is clockwork. It only functions when ropes aren’t clogging its gears.
A Meeting With the Goddess Who Keeps Asking You to Save the World by Lara Eiffe (16, Ireland)*12/5/2020
 she finds you in the empty movie theatre, the hazy one that’s left you stumbling more than once.
“you can be more than a story locked away,” she says, face ghosting before yours like a moth pressed up against the inside of a lightbulb. there’s a shroud between these worlds, some barrier dividing the slurry of magic in hers from the fresh air of yours. you hum a pathetic note, something, (anything) to get her off your back. she always did turn to the heaven-scorched ones. “you could meet the end of the world and look it in the eye and smile.”  annie asks me, do i want to zoom tonight and i say no. annie says, okay, that’s fine. annie says, hope to see you next week then! annie says, we’ll miss you xx.
1. there’s a sad song playing in my head but there’s no music and the lyrics are taking the form of dull hammering against my forehead 2. it’s like, okay, i want to write but i’ve forgotten how 3. on tuesday night i’m planning to stand on the roof during the thunderstorm. i want to feel my shirt clinging to my skin and i want to drink from the clouds a. and i want to scream into the abyss like, do you think when nu wa made hands for humankind she knew that mine would feel empty all the time  i mold my thumb into the bruises on my knees; a royal-purple ache,
euphoric. i exist to be sentenced, a mannequin pruned, observe: my eyes could be gouged-grotesque, my skull dizzy & broken and the blood would garnish my Corpse-- we learn our imperfections, too soon my finger traces harsh the stripes of my hips; taut & taught. please, slough the flesh off my bones where it weighs me down; i want to soar, knees-knocking & hair-whipped. finger, meet throat: salmon-pink & fleshy fulfillment. if only the Body could be emptied forever--  Scarab beetles dig into its skin
Crawling in beneath the eyes Metallic whispers behind the curtains Drawn over the last dredges of its ailing mind Cry of battlefields in the shadowed world Hidden beneath an unsteady painting (It stands before a cracked glass mirror Painting smiles on the face with the shards) Searching for sweetened air, head thrown back, the waters crash into it It drowns in mounds of dying fireflies  [Content warning: strong language]
1 let me start off by saying, i don’t know jack shit about heaven 2 on the first day of dying, you will be sifted you are debris from the wreckage of your past life and your mind was the captain. i assume, you woke with a smile larger than jupiter with your eyelids barely able to close because you can’t stop staring at her, and all the things she is made of heaven you are here. ground yourself on the bed of flowers of this construct  child, speak no evil. grandmother teaches silence as she rips weeds from flower beds. your throat is rooted in disobedience. discarded greenery will be disposed of with the butcher scraps. bleeding cow heart. rotting chicken intestines. goat tongue. tread lightly. mistakes are not permitted to complain of a calloused voice or splintered skin.
child, see no evil. look down, only down.  [Content warning: self-harm]
and as the last train approached the station, i thought i saw her in the blur of people– chipped nail polish and a leather watch, bubblegum lipstick smeared by city lights beneath the ground, time slipped away the only sky was the depths of her eyes i thought i saw her in a ripped-up dress champagne gold the station almost felt real  that evening, we were standing at an abandoned
gas station; the sky had flicked blush at the horizon, painting it dusty rose, with highlighted salmon clouds. while you stood taking photographs for your instagram aesthetics, i suppose that is when i first saw the umbrella girl. weirdly enough, her hat was blood red, almost obnoxiously so. her umbrella, boots and raincoat were a matching pair, glossy and black, like her devious eyes. it wasn't raining, nor hot, so i had always wondered about the purpose of her signature prop. she stood there, her hands posed perfectly around its handle, umbrella placed tastefully over her shoulder. head tilted just so- poised, a doll- those flashing eyes and half smile, like you were the only one in on an inside joke.  [Content warning: mentions of suicide, strong language]
After Kevin Coval. For Shlomo. Aba means Father. i. my manhood was a notebook full of suicide letters and a dictionary of people shaped into fiction and lavender. my manhood was lyric dug into every grave next to my grandfather’s, it was the tombstone woven into the soil like god had became human. suddenly, soon i knew that my manhood became desperate and wanted to vacate humanhood. my manhood was suburbia, i just hadn’t found it yet; my manhood was shlomo not aba, his manhood was predator, my manhood felt like the day he died  [Content warning: suicide ideation] talk to me, he says. the stars have shifted to form his soul, this purest essence imbued within bated bubbles that read typing . . . typing . . . (i am a black hole.
i am imploding at my heart and my intestines feel all twisted, like my body is eating away at my strength as my mind erodes at my hope and the ocean tides wear at cliffs. i read somewhere that black holes have a sunken center, and i find autonomy within this disembodiment—do you feel kinship with the galaxy, have you ever dreamt about going still and turning to stone and returning to the stars?)  you’ll be told to caress the smirks between bloodied rivers
before you’re allowed to touch your own hips like a lover; honeysuckle blossom, lie across ruptured statues, sighing velvet euphonies like a newborn lake and pour into him; but, on an eve of sweet macabre, the wary moon will sing a spare mockingbird’s ballad; now they’ll teach you to beat against yourself until there’s a Starry Night Over the Rhône plastered on broken flesh; second coatings lick beauty with a sugared tongue and they’ll say “garden like God himself” but you know God is a loose pomegranate seed sort of lady, birth swimming in Her endless pupils and spilling like wine atop our salvers; |
