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Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine

a space for youth writing on mental health & identity

The Treatment Room by Kori Bower (21, Ohio)

8/31/2022

The interior appears oddly bright, and so blue -- a
perfect color for the innocent fish circling, blissful,
along the walls, unaware that they’re already trapped.

Directly across from the entrance rests a bed. Firm
foam padding for easy sanitation, rubber straps along
the sides, a pull-out stool at the base -- the sort tiny
legs can never resist, climbing high onto the bed.

I Do(n't) Know by Ella Mask (17, Utah)

8/30/2022

I wasn’t always this way
I don’t know when things changed,
but I know in elementary school
I didn’t throw up because someone dragged me to a party

I didn’t stay in bed because the thought of
talking to people drove me to tears

World Breather by Olivia Lee (14, California)

8/29/2022

I was born feeling my way through the world
A moon orbiting the warmth of other people
I feel the whole solar system and the stars beneath my feet
Dark matter, intangible realms, the unknown, I can feel it between my fingers
My feelings are inconceivably vast, something cosmi

The Waiting Room by Dia Wright (18, Illinois)

8/28/2022

I remember purgatory
psychiatric central
steaming painted car vents, driveway, crowded kids
Brother One, Brother Two, and me--
long and boring road to the Ben Gordon Center
with a pointless blue dog statue

Hymnal by Dia Wright (18, Illinois)

8/27/2022

Bones of the rain
Wind shrieks, whistles
And I remember
All the world was bones
Dry, hollow, shaking
Icicles, like bones, hanging from the rooftops
Sky like a gray glass eye
And all the world was bones.

Three Strikes Out by Renee Chen (15, Taiwan)*

8/26/2022

[Content Warning: Suicide]
1
Kuroda, not my father, was the one who taught me how to play baseball.
  He was the one whom I watched, emulated, and worshiped as a child before the television, black cap on the head and the overlapped letters of NY in sleet-white.
  “He’s Hiroki, and I’m Hiro,” I told my sister once, hands splayed out in the air as if receiving an applause. “We’re connected. Can’t you see?”
  “Just first names, moron,” she said and stole the remote control from my hand, switching over to the movies channel. I ran upstairs, into my room and grabbed a bundle of pillows out then tossed them into the air, sending them across the hallway with my plastic bat, aiming for her face.
  “Three strikes out,” she yelled after catching my balls. I stuck my tongue out at her.
  It wasn’t how baseball worked in real-life, but those were always the rules to her. Three strikes out

Mercy Mother by Amiyuh Tobias (17, Louisiana)

8/25/2022

[Content warning: parental neglect]

From the time that I was born, I’ve been at your mercy, mother.
I am the brunt of your jokes and your worries’ scapegoat.
So, I ask that you would extend to me some mercy, mother.

If I could, considerately, beg you for mere mercy, mother.
I’m second to your will; I’m the corpse your looks killed.
Like God does for you, deliver me your mercy, mother.

Caging Janus by MacCoy Weil (18, Connecticut)

8/24/2022

He sits on his divan bed, hunched over a limp paperback. It’s the same book he’s read at least a dozen times, Of Mice and Men. The camera is an old one, rendering the book in lifeless grayscale. But I’ve seen the cover enough that my imagination fills in the dirt path wending through cyan trees.

Woman before the Rising Sun by Lauren Zhu (17, New York)

8/23/2022

Yellow your lips with borrowed
light and scrapped
scales. This is how you

keep your elbows from
skimming the splintering
rock. Swaddle your
wrists in fern. Bead hand-me-

Linocut by Taiwo Adebowale (16, Maryland)

8/22/2022

[Content Warning: Self Harm]

Every time you returned to heaven
and made the moon bleed your essence,
I read the saturnine rings etched by God
on your mom's skin
to learn your name.

I know your language.
I've spoken in voids like you.

I look up at space,
not to dissociate,
but to carve linocut constellations
in the image of your body.

To EveryBODY Out There by Meenakshi Jha (16, India)

8/21/2022

Dear body,
I hope this finds you in the pink of your health. Whatever I am about to tell you has been long overdue. This is not a justification of any kind, they are just things that I have struggled to tell you
for a long, long time.

Yesterday, Blossoming by Noel Ullom (17, Ohio)*

8/20/2022

Hydrangeas share a history
of tracing my family name.
My grandmother, the keeper
of breathing colors, introduced me once
to permanence: oranges & pinks
weaving tightly around her fingertips.
Her buds mistake green for canvases
and paint ecosystems upon their stems:
reds, blushing for the nearby man
and inheritance ruby rings

tonight I killed a moth and I’m still sad about it by Mercuri Lam (16, Texas)

8/19/2022

[Content Warning: death]

Moths flock to my windowsill and it’s like their ritual to
Dance above my bed, above my body. They are like strippers

Who reek of disharmony and broken-prettiness. My
Grandmother told me that moths bring renewal, yet nothing

Seemed to change as they mated above my eyes in darkness,
I suddenly remember sixth-grade biology, when Mrs.W-something-

The Burning of Stories by Maryam (14, Britain)

8/18/2022

The flames curled around the papery, inky tales of time, turning them to dead ash. The smoky smell of thousands of burned pages and tonnes of melted leather wafted through the air in a hazy vapour that shot up to hide the stars. A girl stood before the fire, which lit up the deep night, whilst casting dark shadows, like long knives, and sent them flickering across her face. Many such fires have been started – the particulars of which this one was, do not matter. And many such girls have stood before them in a likewise fashion: too young not to have sparkly eyes and furrowed brows, but old enough for their fists to be clenched, and feet unmoving long after they are left alone with the dark, once-starry night, burning forest their only warmth.

Beginning After the End by Sarah Wang (17, Canada)

8/17/2022

Things went downhill
so, I'm back
here, enclosed
in this white
room
Again.

it's a circus and we all paid to be here by Jada Leung (16, California)

8/16/2022

and here you are, walking on your tightrope
asking yourself why there isn’t a net; the
higher you are
the quieter the audience—
and so you keep walking
and we’ll keep clapping
and dancing
and juggling around you
while you promise to stay in line

To want the weight of the sky by Mahita Dissanayake (17, Sri Lanka)

8/15/2022

The truth is,
If I could,
I’d ask Atlas for his weight
So that I could
finally be free
of mine.

I would carry the weight of the sky on my back
With the cry of the hawk,
and the wisp of the dream,
And I would be able to nod and wave,
And live like the passing breeze.

I Am Not Afraid to Disappear by Katherine Dyal (16, Texas)

8/14/2022

[Content warning: implications of intimacy, medical procedures, self-harm, and suicide ideation]

I am not afraid to disappear.
Strike me with the back of your hand,
and I will crumble like pencil lead and scorched paper.
I was already made of ashes, and now I'm falling apart.
I want your fingers pressing into the back of my spine,
Leaving fingerprint-shaped bruises on my skin
  until I shrivel up like a flower.
I want your hands, with their knobbed knuckles, dark veins, and creaky bones,
To scoop me up and cradle me like I'm about to die...
  and then let me slip through your fingers and onto the ground.
Trying to hold on to me is like trying to keep water cupped in your palms,
But God, I wouldn't mind being held against your skin.
You can take and take and take until every last drop of me is wrung dry.
I am not afraid to disappear.

This is not a poem by Hunter Golder (17, Pennsylvania)

8/13/2022

I am a watcher,
through four panes
and silver screens.

The bad days are not like in the movies.
I still rise from bed
and drift to and fro,
like a middle-class phantom.
I call them my "sad days."

peel potatoes by Isabella Kanczuk (17, Massachusetts)

8/12/2022

[Content warning: domestic abuse]

i wish i had remembered how it felt to fly.

red tape wrapping.
tenuous hands clutching.
gritty plates shoving.

he focused through, placid by the resonating light and haunting model dreams.
while chasing in all lucidity, feeling gravity beneath, and exceptionally bound by the unwanted.
nothing is more dignified than a textbook contradiction.

My First Killing by Agathe Chave-Lucas (22, France)

8/10/2022

I killed her one night, when nobody else was around. I cannot remember if the moon and stars were gleaming above our heads, maybe, maybe not. I did not look at the sky when I killed her. I was so focused on my task that the world became a blur.

The only clear thing I can remember is that it was dark and that except for her tears it was silent. A thick, pasty silence that enveloped us like a blanket.

I was scared. I knew what I had to do, but I was scared. It was my first killing, my first murder. I didn’t know what it would do to me.

Plane Trajectory by Agathe Chave-Lucas (22, France)

8/9/2022

Plane Trajectory (or, my mind, before):

Before
was a plane
that never landed

never broke
the gray-on-gray – neat straight lines, parallel, barbed grid –
carpet of clouds

Ulysses by Aria Kamal (16, Massachusetts)

8/8/2022

He stands, back to the wall
as the automobiles drag themselves through the rain
(he's always wanted to ride in one,
hear the rain click and bounce off the metal roof
rather than soaking silently through his father's hat)
headlights scaring the fog away
billowing smoke that follows them
like hounds on the trail.

snow-blind by Aria Kamal (16, Massachusetts)

8/7/2022

diamond studded days
white sky swelling through windows
of december frost

sudden-bright of snow
solar flares behind my eyes
early years hidden

Anxiety Felt Like a Barbed Wire Noose by Ivy McMullin (13, Florida)

8/6/2022

[Content warning: violence and body horror]

Rhynn gasped for breath, the water cupped in her hands above the bathroom sink drowning her. Trembling hands pushed the water to her face, attempting to put out the fire behind her eyes. God, she couldn’t breathe. Could not think. Could not make it stop. Her frail, shaking hands smeared the water across her sharp cheekbones, up toward the freckled bridge of her nose, and painted war marks on the plane of her forehead. It felt like blood. Quaking hands scrubbed harshly at the delicate skin of her face. Another gasp crested the threshold of her lips like a rope slipping from desperate hands and leaving burns in its wake. Her next swallow was of fire.

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