Category: 2024 Submissions

I always feel her resentment on my shoulders.
Every time I enter a room, I ask her,
“What happened? Why couldn’t you love me in a way that I understood?”
She gives me the cold shoulder.
She looks me in the eyes, takes my tongue from my mouth,
and holds it.
She chooses when I get to speak
And to her liking, it was never.
“I beg to know is it because I remind you of yourself? Or am I different from what you wanted?”
She walks past me.
“I won’t call you mom, even though you are my mother. I won’t call you that.”
She walks out the door.
She taught me how to be alone a long time ago
“I’m sorry that I’m hard to love,” I admit to her
And she says I should be.

I look along the splintered wood of faux halls and melting faces, burning candle wax and bare, wooden beams, praising a man we’ve never seen.
If he were real, if He were real, I’d beg him to strike me down.
I am the daughter laid to rest, sleeping in her unmade sheets; I am the son you never wanted, but the sun you always had—and I have wept, and I have wept.
I wonder if you would have loved me more if I were always your son, but now I have learned it doesn’t matter.

It will never be less bad, but it will be easier to hold, less to weigh, as I examine the fractured mosaic and hold it close to my heart, and I know I will look back in shame, but understand,
I am not kind and I am not sweet;
I will speak and move and live like a man that was born a girl—and you cannot change that. I am the girl left behind and I am the boy finding her again. I am the amalgamation of splintered, fractured light you shine on us, always us.

The girl saw herself as something akin to a train station. People frequently stop by for a brief period of time only to hop on the next train and ride away. She saw this when her mom left with no explanation, never to come back. She saw this when her friends moved away for college, each slowly talking to her less and less. She saw this when her dad passed away and left her alone in a small empty house. Each time someone left, they took a piece of her with them. Throughout her life she had many romantic relationships. Each one always ended the same. They would meet and fall in love, she would entrust a piece of her dwindling soul to them, then they would leave. People took from her so often that pieces started peeling off by themselves. Eventually she was left with so little of herself she could no longer move. She was stuck alone at that train station, unable to get on a train of her own.

Sitting on top of my roof, I take in the view.
The neighboring house billows out fluffy smokestacks as the tenant bakes her annual homemade lemon pie.
A kettle of hawks circle nearby, hunting down their next meal.
Chattering squirrels scamper amongst the trees
Fluttering leaves dance with the wind, gracefully descending to the ground.
I nestle my fingers between the shingles while the wind plays with my hair.
Crack.
Slowly, I bring my eyes to the origin of the sound.
Crack.
Pulling away rapidly, I try to wedge myself free from the shingles grasp.
The chittering of squirrels fill the nearby trees.
Crack.
I squirm, I yank. I pull, I push. The roof does not free me.
The wind tosses my body from side to side.
Crack.
The sound of splitting wood echoes across the trees.
Silence fills the air.
Why did the trees stop swaying? Why has the wind gone astray? Yet, why do the smokestacks grow?
Acrid air fills my lungs.
And I plummet inwards with the roof.
My vision becomes hazed.
Breathing is a new challenge.
The only thing I make out,
Are the shadows of the hawks circling above me.
Taking in their new prey.

In years long past, a sapling small,
Nurtured by hands in cloth so white,
They cared for me, both one and all,
To grow strong, my roots took flight.

But as I reached my adult grace,
Their presence faded day by day,
Yet in the stillness of this place,
I yearned for them, so far away.

In time, new folks did claim my home,
Yet Their quarrels marred the peaceful land,
Their greed and strife, like tempests, roamed,
Till driven out by a stronger hand.

One survivor sought refuge near,
Beneath my weathered, mellowed bark,
Was a short-lived respite, free of fear,
Amidst my figure, stiff and sharp.

Yet battle cries hung in the air,
The remained fled, breathless, in haste and dread,
Until an arrow struck, a heart laid bare,
At my roots, the fallen lay dead.

The wars’ aftermath, a bitter fate,
My fellow trees and I laid low,
As stumps, we bore a heavy weight,
In silence, we watched life’s ebb and flow.

Children’s laughter, echoes sweet,
Around my base, where friendships bloom,
Yet, I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t greet,
Only bear their weight in this silent gloom.

I’m the sand in the top of an hourglass, fading away until I’m no longer there. My friends say I’ll make it through, that I’ll definitely survive this plague eating away at me for months. I don’t believe them. I am getting smaller and smaller. No matter what I do, nothing that used to make me happy hits the same anymore. Music, video games, reading… It just feels like a waste of time. I don’t know where I want to be in 2 years from now, it just seems so wrong that I’ll get that far. Whatever I do, I just get sucked into this wormhole of boredom and longing for something new. All my real life friends that I thought knew me haven’t seen me in months. I lost everyone I cared about, I’ve lost my drive and everything just feels bland. I don’t really know what I’ll do to get out of this, but I hope my only out isn’t the one that many people immediately think of.
“You’ll make it through.”
“You can get your life together.”
“You are valued and people care about you.”
“We will always be there for you.”
I really hope so, friends.

It’s an incomplete desire for something I’ve never had. “A part of my heart lives in the work I’ve made,” they say. I look down at the fraction of my soul I have strangled in my hands.
There is something so gentle yet grueling yet possessive yet messy yet rewarding about poetry. The need, the want, the love, all of the strength and devotion borne from held-back desperation.
Anxiety feels like anticipation, feels like hunger, feels like something resting against my ribs, taking a breath before it sinks its teeth—turns to fear.
It’s something so strange to me, hearing people say, “I dance the line between good and evil”, because I know that they do not. When they say that, they do not mean that they are on the line between good and evil, but that they want to do whatever they’d like with no consequences, no attachment. No, the ones who truly understand are the ones who know that there is no line.

Men don’t cry. We slip from the comfort of our own beds, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, and it all still hurts; from the moment we rise, until the skies shift to darkness; where we can sit on the edge of our beds, and breathe in, and breathe out. We were always told to hide it all, underneath clenched jaws and trembling little fists. To go through schoolyards and dinner tables; with darkened eyes and plastic hearts forced to be made of stone. A generation of little boys in suits and ties, grieving something we never had, at the edge of a burial ground; of a childhood spent in buried aches. All those “look me in the eyes when I talk,” all those “boys don’t cry”, all those words that all men oddly share like the ones before them; turned into unwanted rituals for a silent yet violent manhood, an open door to a madhouse made of tempered glass, where we all sit together yet sit alone, with clenched jaws and wrinkly, calloused fists, wishing for something we lived yet never felt, a childhood or a hug; things we never had, yet always miss.