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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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 But i can make a new one. let me
Give you an example: two nights ago i sucked beauty Into my belly Then heaved it out, churned gently And sealed away wistful immortality, Hexagonal
 There is no life: here
It is darker than I would have liked I place one foot onto the darkness Breathe in wobble Breathe out  [Content warning: eating disorders, grief, and school shootings]
Being a teenager isn’t hard they say, but they haven’t considered how hard it is to be a teenage GIRL. Wake up, first thing on the to do list is to scroll through her socials and see how much she is worth based on the bikini photo she posted last night with her abusive boyfriend. While she is scrolling she sees the bleach blonde models with slim figures and perfect skin. Why don’t I look like that? She whispers to herself with a tear rolling down her cheek. Next step of her routine is to head to the bathroom. Step on the scale, look at herself in the mirror, and scrub her skin until it is as clear as the photoshopped model she saw earlier. She’s up half a pound because she couldn’t stand the thirst any longer. As she steps off the scale she sighs, picking at her skin as she observes every part of herself in the mirror.  time sinks
like everything else in the gravity well of my childhood bedroom. i’m bound to the carpet by a force stifling suffocating extinguishing.  I think they are conspicuous
When they tell me the quiet will bring calm I think they are conspicuous When they watch the rain streak down my Window panes  Knots swell around
pruned branches. Limbs died here once. If some branches live for bird nests, then perhaps these tumors also live. A nuthatch caching in a knar seems to think so.  blessed? our hands were once intertwined over valleys
as we tongued the wisps that drizzle from the moon, fingers twitching as our legs moved us across galaxies, running until our stoned calves burnt like a feather in a volcano, euphoric -drunk from the isolation we hammered into the world when the sky was eclipsed. but we learned: night turns moon into sun, and the dazed skies oxidize into poison they force us  [Content warning: self-destructive behavior and suicidal ideation]
Candles cast a quivering light on the words of a letter crafted to disguise the truth. Ribbons of fire are ever-burning through the logic that makes this message seem okay.  you are something forged, something remade. your name is a moth
with eyes for wings, more limb than insect. you can try to carve the letters out of the lipstick stains on the cracked bathroom mirror, but you’ll find only yourself, dissected. eyes. lips. tongue. I’ll tell you now: you are a combination of scavenged parts, of your past selves littering  [Content Warning: suicidal thoughts, mental torment]
Have you ever had a mindache? My mind feels like it's eating itself. It's not quite like a headache; The mind ache could be felt Not through physical kicks, Or striking pulsing pelts,  stem to kernel
kernel to husk peel dark shells to find secrets in smooth grains. parch the rice, then swaddle it  Oh, early mornings of twenty-ten, what must she
have looked like to you? Outside every day at five-thirty AM, she’d stand on the concrete slab bridging the creek that cut through their driveway and wait alone in the dark for the bus to arrive.  My hair is pulling out of my scalp, heavy
like the cords attached to my head -- sticky, itchy, painful to take off. They are venomous snakes and I am Medusa. Memories, sucked out of me with the force of her former beauty, with the cursed ease  [Content warning: gun violence]
it's a dying texan midnight i squint & my grandmother glows asleep in the corner my mother becomes herself a little less lawyer woman man financial child bearer for seven hours.  I traced my fingers
against the cheap beads of tightly bound trinkets as it scarred my skin. Mama loves jewelry
 oh look, more people i see
under my bald-eagle throne of warfare and welfare wearing their smiles backwards. eating their hands.  [TW: implied domestic abuse and alcoholism]
My fear is clammy palms tugging the bedsheet trembling fingers hitting the light switch hysterical breaths piercing the silence My anger is hate in my cold gaze tightness in my drawn shoulders fire in my empty chest  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 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
 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  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.
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