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a space for youth writing & mental health discussion
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 i. my dearest america-- i profess that yes, i may not be pretty but i am not exotic. america i wish i didn’t believe in otherworldly life but i can’t seem to forget how you gaze at my dark hair & sun-kissed skin like an unearthly artifact. i bury my green card that says that i am a daughter of an alien & it grows into a dandelion weed. america if you are a garden of eden i crave to drink your ambrosia from chopsticks & porcelain spoons and still taste salvation, swallow your life’s elixir in jasmine tea & rice wine and sing that i’ve lived the american dream. my dearest america i profess that i have too much longing, lying to myself that no, i am not hungry.
yours truly, a girl who spills tears over your flower boutique’s freshly cut flowers because you’ve stripped them of their elegantly tangled roots.  [Content warning: self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and references to emotional abuse]
the concept is easy: my mother is a smoking gun, lying on the worlds she bought and kept, keeping her eyes steady on my slow climb down to her. when we talk, it is in jokes,  Over the roads in front of the Homigot,
the air is spiced with miyeok. The gritty breath of autumn bends through the roar -ing morning as silver quilts of clouds over the fallen foliage and withered flowers, drift through the blue in the sky – graying  act i.
in which we are introduced to a flesh/ gathered in gorges and islets/ and the cherry bloom of blood/ as if to remind us that a small wound is yet/ a wound. feel/ the dull touch of scar tissue pooling under/ bruises and remember pain/ loses its efficacy the longer it stays./ see/ how the body that sees too much/ blinds itself.  on randall jarrell’s death of the ball turret gunner
i. loosed from this life thin cradle of reality peeled back onion-like to its rotting core  [Content warning: self-harm, suicidal thoughts]
a kid in his very last years of school will always be some new and terrifying phenomenon; churning between existence and adulthood because we know only one of them allows you to breathe.  Begonia petals shift across the garden,
eloquent like cursive on the page. Spring’s sweet release. I ride the west wind. Air knows no bounds. Root -less. Like this body. I am told that is poetry. But I yearn for an anchor. A hand that fits mine. A trellis to home this vessel of loneliness.  it left you splintered
with clefts in all ten fingers, your hands rendered ineffectual yet still able to support a skull so hike up your head  let me make this confession
before it strangles itself in my throat this is the only love i have ever known clenched like a fist in anger knuckles blanching white  I air my grievances in a blank room
with a woman across from me She sits with a pen, breathing in my words Coughing on my tone of voice I think she knows my mind is an abandoned swimming pool The algae flutters on the bottom as the warm sun beats down on the cool water It should be beautiful growth But it only makes me ugly  [Content warning: self-harm and suicide]
somewhere beneath her raw, patchwork skin, there is a burning candle, lit within ivory moon-ribs. its wax drips down through her sunken chest, and when it is spent, the undead heart will finally rest. once the flame has filled her hollow lungs,  [Content warning: racial violence]
Hanging abandon, testament of life lolling tongues quirking mouths fluttering eyelids, look away we don’t see colors. The stench of summer forces air into branches, rustling leaves, up from what remains. Look towards it. Look up.  i admire her perfect hands,
seemingly sculpted by aphrodite herself. her flawless nail polish flaunts itself like the glaze of a pot fresh out of the kiln. my fingers are shredded and ravaged, providing a humorous disparity for only the gods to laugh about.  The Bukhansan trees
let go of their autumn leaves, setting them free from the frolic of the wind. They spiral across the slope, colors swirling as they fluttered in the wind, finding their way through the wild grass. I try to catch one  It was grandmother’s 70th birthday,
in the summer of 2014 at a garden in Seoul, in a family photo. The muted strokes of white across the sky leave transitory patches of blue, sunlight bleaching the soil.  [Content warning: self-harm/death]
"i’m not allowed to have sharp things." does that explain anything. at all. maybe it does. maybe not.  It’s winter,
before you’re layered in baby powder, yet to blend within. Inside that bowl covered in jagged rocks, you glow, a deep turquoise that’ll soothe me like a cup of chamomile tea.  I saw a place for Fakers in Hell,
Constructed wholly of filthy silicon walls, Plagued by the sound of the knell. Right in the middle of this insanity, There lies a wide and deep well, Towards the trenches lead with indignity.  [Content warning: domestic abuse]
Mama, I feel like a stranger in my own house Tell me do you hear me now, can you help me out? I can trace every touch, every step, every breath we made Halls of this place heard his yells Walls of my room listened for my sobs Hope the brackish tears make the memories fade  [Trigger warning: suicide]
i am standing in the pews draped in all black and you are wearing your favorite all white sundress. no one can see it, but if i squint hard enough, i can just make out your petticoat peeking out of the casket and if i squint even harder, i imagine your hands lifting the old oak open bursting out from your supposed eternal rest with no warning at all.  There is a black spot under my driver’s seat window
It is non-unique, joined by other assorted stains both greater in size and darker and color than it Because the car has been allowed to fall into disarray. There was a time when I welcomed that. I saw each dent scrape and scar adorning the metal body as a sign of a life-well lived, a journey well-travelled, for the poor old car who will someday sit in a scrapyard, unloved The scavengers who loot it for parts will know it was once loved by me, or by someone, anyways. I suppose the who doesn’t matter.  What lies beyond her eyes?
Well, no one knows what she dreams and thinks. Every grin and every glance is a guise in the depths of cyberspace, as she sinks into the battles raging within waiting for someone to see beyond her eyes and into her life beneath its skin.  Dear Diane,
Isn’t it funny how things never go according to plan like how not all dandelion seeds will take root, but wasn’t it beautiful the way they rode the wind’s hand and landed so far away?  [Content warning: starvation; implications of eating disorders, self harm, and suicidal thoughts]
there’s a hungry thing with its gaping mouth calling to be fed starving, clawing for an escape on the insides of my ribs  17 years of sleepless hours spent trying to scrub the coldness from my bones. the moon and I share a secret loneliness through my stardust-smudged window. I ask, will we ever know?
nights spent squinting at the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted lazily above my head. the glacial uncertainty will never leave my body; it will continue to starve me until I run out of sentences. a haunting epiphany waltzes through the desolate night until it finds me alone in my glowing bedroom, heart pulsing to the movement of the pas de deux. |
