Softer Worlds
Tell me a story.
What I mean is
make me a softer
world.
I want to be able to press my fingertips
against it. What I mean is I want to feel it
give a little.
Until There Was Nothing Left
First came Andrea Lakes. She wandered into my dorm room on move-in day while my siblings were still unpacking my clothes, and my mother still had tears in her eyes. Andrea shook my father’s hand and introduced herself as the girl who would be living across the hall from me. She smiled, and bubblegum-pink lips parted to reveal teeth too perfect to have not been paid for.
Please Don’t Look at Me Like That: Defining and Refining Mental Health Stigma
What is the first thing you would think of if someone told you they had schizophrenia? Do you have a posi-tive reaction, a negative one, or do you not know what to think? What has influenced that feeling? The determiner of how one would react to disclosure of mental illness is heavily dependent on mental health stigma.
on self-fulfilling prophecies
the day the Lutheran church burnt down on main and hartgrove we starved ourselves in the parking lot.
you didn’t care for architecture, the principle and I resented religion, the lines, the structure calling out to God when I knew Him already
Building Ambition
I guess if I’m going to blame someone, it has to be you. Tucked in a corner classroom in the science wing on the 2nd floor of North Hunterdon High School, you reign. Your kingdom consists of 16-year-old AP Biology students with chewed fingernails and hormonal acne.
The ADDict Poems
A short time ago, Clotho spun my thread with an alcoholic lifeline measured in the sand. & with my allotted time, I decided to live amongst the dead, the likes of Thomas, Berryman & Lowell, whom I celebrated as the most cherished lyrical brethren blessed by the eldest muse Kalliope.
Tune Up Your Wellness
Maybe my inclination to music is thanks to my pure immersion within it. As soon as I could speak, I was singing with that choir. I shamelessly swayed between the pews and bounded on the red cushions unable to control the grip music had on my muscles. I was a machine on my toy piano, and my Disney music box played any ac-companiment I could not.
Sylvan Sapphics: An Exploration into Sapphism and Cottagecore
Cottagecore is an aesthetic characterised by quaint cottages surrounded by dense foliage, wicker picnic baskets full of preserves, and billowy prairie dresses. This rural ideation has a lifestyle component too, quite timely in its roman-ticisation of domestic activities like baking, sewing, and embroidery. While this aesthetic has entered the mainstream, it has found its greatest audience with sapphic-identifying people—women and non-binary people who experience attraction to women and women-aligned people.