blog.maryahornbacher.com

“Well, after this I should think nothing of falling down stairs.” - Alice to the Cheshire Cat after falling down the rabbit hole.

writing posted prior to October 2007

Friday, July 22nd 2005
7:30 AM
POST WRITING

Here’s a spot where we can post snippets of our writing. As you know, these posts have a cut-off point, which is very irritating but nonetheless the case. Please limit your overall post to no more than three posts. When it gets too long, I’ll start a new one. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, but no journal entries. Let’s stick to the specific genres. As always, NO SYMPTOMS. Please stay away from pieces that may be triggering. If your stuff is all triggering, write new stuff for the board! Have fun…
—M
130 Comment(s).

Posted by Leigh Carter:
How wonderful to discover you have a site! I tried to have my editor contact you through Harper Collins to thankyou for the comfort I found in “Wasted” in knowing I’m not alone, but he said he had no luck. So a huge thankyou and warm hug. Anyways, a poem…

The Grand Act
By: L.B. Carter

If only
my words could flow as freely
as regrets from my memory,
then silence would
no longer deafen, and maybe
your spirit would free me.

Up until now
I’ve learned to deal somehow,
to hide the things you’d never allow
and hide the tears welling up.
I’m the cover-up Queen, taking her bow,
but always remembering my sinister vow.

I sold my soul
so long ago
to a force all too many know,
we call it fame.
They call it rock and roll.
Never mind the way it takes it’s toll.

Oh, you’ll tumble,
rock, roll, and stumble,
constantly fumble,
and try to hide the unglamourous
doped-up mumble,
as the world around you begins to crumble.

Another day
another million away
from what you wanted anyway-
wasn’t it?
Whatever you say.
You’ve begun to rock and rot away.

My voice
by some forgotten choice
strained with old rejoice,
has forgotten how to smile.
Drowned out by the noise,
the bargains and ploys.

But pressed,
if one should suggest
it leaves me depressed?
No, I don’t think
I’ve been anything but blessed.
Just inappropriately dressed…

For such a facade of a show.

Copyright©2005 Leigh Barbara Carter
Monday, July 25th 2005 @ 12:59 AM
Posted by Ena:
I wrote this last month, and am currently working on “Part II”.

“Delilah”

Your words are like a fortress
in my dark shadows of doubt and
your words are like a fortress
slipping past this sneer and this pout.
Your words have kept me sane over the years,
calming the senses, hushing the ego.
Your words have kept me sane over the years
and hold me true to what I know.

I can mimic you as mockingbirds do-
I can mimic you as mockingbirds do.
They say I’m quite talented.

Let’s move beyond the language, shall we?

Where is the form?
It’s hidden in the rambles.
Where is the fire?
It’s ablaze deep within.

Can you feel my heartbeat from across the room?
These bright eyes can see right through you,
these shy eyes can see the real you.
Can you see me tremble from across the room?
These warm hands can grasp and stroke you,
these open hands can guide and hold you.

Let’s move beyond the sentiments, shall we?

Where is the form?
It’s buried in the shambles.
Where is the fire?
It’s burning down below.

I ask the angels for clues to string ’round my neck.
Either I will absorb their guidance through osmosis
or the messages will cut off my circulation.

What else is there to say, my dear?
I sit and wait.
Monday, July 25th 2005 @ 6:59 PM
Posted by Anonymous:
i feel like i’m going out of my mind,
trying to articulate my fear,
in a voice eloquent and refined,
the next worst thing was if you could hear.

Thank the good lord for composure,
thank the good lord for pride,
i couldn’t survive the exposure,
of the needs i have inside.

I can see your knowing eyes,
boring into my burning face,
i hate how you can smell the lies,
you know i’ve lost a futile race.

I wonder what it’s like to just be,
to feel that kind of relief,
not to find ploys in all you see,
and to rest on unquestioned belief.

That is all i’d ever need.
Tuesday, July 26th 2005 @ 5:41 AM
Posted by Say:
Yay! It’s so great to read others’ writing! I’ll be posting tonight.
Tuesday, July 26th 2005 @ 7:39 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
Okay, here’s a random poem of mine. It’s one of my newest, so this is only the second draft, but I’d love comments anyway!

“Digame”

If I come to you
offering love poems,
will you show me the way
that you see a woman
beyond the blue
of my eyes?

Color will not interfere.
All that will have meaning
is the fact that we are
here now,
that at dusk we smell
like earth,
that it is
under our fingernails.

What will matter
will be the way
that you make coffee -
strong, and dark -
that you prepare it
for me alone,
that our mugs
are ceramic
and heavy, and chipped.
That the cracks mimic
the waves of my hair
as I smile up at you,
lips closed mysteriously
because I know that my eyes
hold you
as your browned skin
holds me.

This is what I know.
That we will stay in,
that we will walk through the fields,
that only our voices will sound.
We will trip through dialects,
we will speak in fragments.
My lips will form
digame,
your tongue will attempt
this
today.

The time
is what makes this real.
Before it has a chance,
the air will cool,
the ground will harden,
and you
will return
to El Salvador

and I will not go.

I will return
to my foothills.

But still,
we will always have this:
the steaming mugs of coffee,
clutched between both hands
as we wait
for the thaw.
Wednesday, July 27th 2005 @ 5:32 PM
Posted by Stacy:
Okay, this is a chapter summary from my book proposal. This is Chapter Eight. The book is called Loud in the House of Myself, from an Anne Sexton poem. It’s a memoir of bipolar disorder. Is that all? Yes, I think so. Let’s see how many entries this takes…

I am a slut. Free from Robby, thinking, Well, what the hell, everybody knew it all along, I decide that throwing one’s legs over one’s head might be a way to win friends and influence people. Kelly and I go to bars, where we get in because we look so fabulous for Fayetteville. We spend our days high, scouring thrift shops, and at night we huddle in her blue-tinted bathroom, where the bare fluorescent bulb makes our skin look green and heightens the contrast of the black mold spots on the pale pink shower curtain. We apply each other’s false lashes and liquid eyeliner, and she teases my hair into a bouffant so we can go to the gay bars looking like Lady Miss Kier from Dee-Lite and the bartender will give us free Cape Cods. We’ll get a good buzz on and then go find straight guys to fuck at the skate park.

That summer, I do things I am truly ashamed of, the things to which any shrink could point and say, There, pathological bipolar behavior. I drive drunk, I have sex in parking lots with men whose names I don’t remember, I take lots of drugs. I waste my time and my brain, but at least I’m in control of the wastage this time. Nobody is telling me I can’t skip grades, nobody is telling me about my potential, nobody is telling me that no one else is as hard on me as I am on myself. I am not sitting in Prairie Grove, being bored, waiting out my life until I can leave. No, indeed, I am sitting thirty minutes away from Prairie Grove, on a dirty couch with the fluff coming out, chain-smoking in a basement. At least, I tell myself, I chose it.

And, by god, I’ll choose my major, too. I go to an on-campus play because I met a guy who’s in it at a bar the night before, and after t
Thursday, July 28th 2005 @ 9:41 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
the play another of the cast members flirts with me, and I tell him, “I’m going to be a theatre major, too.”

“Good,” he says. “It’s always nice to have new faces in the department. Especially pretty ones.” He winks at me, and I go home and imagine having his babies. I lie awake plotting about how I’m going to get him into bed, how long it will take, how well-endowed he might be.

This is not exactly the stellar academic career of my dreams.

Still, I decide that I will reinvent myself as a theatre major at the U of A. I’ll share cigarettes and bon mots in the green room with clever students in piano scarves. Even though my life is out of control, I have a certain amount of artistic talent on which I can fall back; a force, dynamism, and vitality imparted by my intense emotional states. In the first week of school I attend auditions and land the part of Agnes in Agnes of God.

It turns out that this was expected to be the thesis role of a popular graduate student named Trigger; as a result, the girls in the department immediately revile me. As if the universe hadn’t sent me enough bizarre correspondence in the missives of my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, I begin finding nasty notes from these girls with my name on them, folded junior-high style, pinned to the bulletin board in the green room. Every day I show up at school and hear the rumors about my latest sexual exploits. This distresses me, the guys in the theatre department at the University of Arkansas are perhaps the only men in Fayetteville with whom I haven’t had sex (my backstage crush having turned out to be gay.)

As I sit in the closet writing on myself at night, I select my Sharpies based on a system of how difficult they are to wash off (if I’ve done something particularly terrible, I use black, whereas a lesser sin might be orange.) I am collecting other people’s words on my skin because I have no identity of my own. As an actor, howev
Thursday, July 28th 2005 @ 9:42 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
however, I am given some respite: if I’m playing a role, my absence of a self feels less hollow. I struggle to get cast in every play, every student production, anything I can, and my desperation is evident. I go into auditions with entire scripts memorized, overprepared and ready to show off. I have sobbing breakdowns in the bathroom if I think someone else is doing better in a class or a tryout than I am. My whole entire being depends on escaping myself.

When I’m onstage, or in my acting classes, I’m able to perform at the top of my game, because I know what is expected of me; I know who I’m supposed to be. But shortly after Agnes of God ends its run, once I no longer have to show up and produce the stigmata every night, I find myself crying alone in a Laundromat because, even though I’m holding the dripping cap in my hand, I can’t remember being the one who poured the detergent in the washer.

I am exercising at least two hours a day, living on Cap’n Crunch and coffee, and trying hard to be normal. I’ve even started accepting the Laura Ashley finery my mother offers up, her garage sale finds, the dresses with flowers and lacy collars she bought for two bucks. It is in just such a dress, with my shoulder-length hair freshly permed, that I meet Kirk.

Kirk is a tall, blonde, blue-eyed skier from Colorado who has come to the U of A to attend law school. We have part-time jobs at the same restaurant in the summer of 1991. Within a week of meeting, he’s gotten me into his underfilled waterbed in the prefab apartment complex where his John Grisham novels sit on the shelf next to his Eagles CDs. I try to ignore his taste and décor, concentrating only on the fact that he’s telling me he loves me. Within two weeks we’re living together.

Kirk is ten years older than me, and he’s divorced and has a child. He also still happens to be in love with his ex-wife, Holly. Holly is now living in a cinderblock apartment in the student h
Thursday, July 28th 2005 @ 9:43 AM
Posted by Stacy:
Yikes! That was a bad idea…I thought it was much shorter. Also, please, if that is in any way triggering to anyone, forgive me, and Marya, feel free to delete it…

I’ll post more later if people want it!
Thursday, July 28th 2005 @ 9:44 AM
Posted by Mars:
Say: did have time to read all of yours.

Anonymous: I liked the way your poem made my eyes fall down the page, but they hit a little jagged edge when you said something about cracks then jumped to hair–which was a stretch and then you went straight to teeth which didn’t quite flow. I know I took the liberty of being the first to post a critical on here so here, eat me up:

The galaxy stretches out from my toes
where I stand on that ledge that mobody sees
because nobody wants to see it.
But you can’t help feeling the void
when you know you’re gonna fall.

Do you know how it crushes me
to see stardrops fall from you eyes, and roll off
your face, the moon in my sky
as we reach for heaven–
horizontal tango in the darkness.

Hold me on this ledge:
I feel the wind of infinity as I stretch to lick time.
You’re the only one holding on now
and as much as I want to taste heaven–
don’t let go.
Thursday, July 28th 2005 @ 6:04 PM
Posted by Sara:
Something I wrote while at an in-patient treatment center years ago…

Alive

I feel.
My emotions was over me like a wave of salty ocean water.
I feel.
Breathing deep, I realize that I am not numb.
Numbness.
Cold, dark, lonely.
Like a desolate unfeeling abyss.
No longer am I numb.
Alive.
Fresh, colorful, tingling.
I am alive and feeling,
No longer am I alone.
Peace has grown in my heart,
And my soul has been transformed.
Monday, August 1st 2005 @ 6:42 AM
Posted by Amanda J:
These are extremely recent. If they’re triggering, please tell me and I can delete. I’d love feedback!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I haven’t cried in a long time.
I thought you should know.
But I dont want to be fixed –
it’s peaceful in here and
crying’s too messy anyway.

So what are you going to do?
Say I’m Sorry and walk out?
Say See you next time!
Maybe.
But will there be a next time?

I keep bluffing
but no one’s calling
my phone’s not ringing
did I give you the wrong number?
Sorry darling
maybe that was on purpose
(subconsciously, that is)

Those pills in my nightstand
are dangerous they dull the pain
but not our kind, no.
But we all know a bit about physical pain, dont we?

There’s too much pain in the world
here, take these theyll help
they taste like candy
swollow them with some juice
it’s just like childhood
all that blind trust.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Do I sound really crazy?
No, tell me the truth
look at me
tell me dammit!

Do I sound crazy?
You don’t know?
I told you to look at me!
What? Are you afraid
I’ll read the answer in your
eyes?

At least now I know I’m not
the only one lying and pretending
and hiding.
You’re doing it too.

That’s nice to know.
Monday, August 1st 2005 @ 1:51 PM
Posted by LpK:
21.

I will always be seen as the tomboy:

the always willing to get their hands, face or clothes dirty despite the location, despite the occassion, let’s go out on a drunk run at 4am crazy, drink you under the table willing, “one of the guys”, little sister, “cover your ears at this part when you’re at a house full of males full well knowing they’ll make you listen anyway”, random as all hell, moxy-driven, crazy living, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out jiving, unruly, call you out but love you later, “i had fun but I really gotta leave, darling”, fiesty, scrappy, fast moving, talking, living, grass-stain loving, take one for the the team breathing, walking contridiction styling, never get too close feeling, hyped-up, raw, (smack talking and story telling) lingo like a dude type of…

girl.

and you know,

I’ve realized- that even though I will most likely be nothing but that to all of the males in my life that I will meet and have met,

I think I’m content with it

not because I have to be

but because really,

maybe I’ve always wanted nothing but

just that.
Monday, August 1st 2005 @ 10:59 PM
Posted by Say:
I wrote this one today.

OUT OF HABIT

First,
I wonder if you
can save me.
I wonder
if you can give me
mugs of steaming tea,
sweet with cream
and honey,
if you can smile and say,
“Drink this.
Ribs have no value
for me.”

I wonder
if you want
to take pictures of me,
to surprise and freeze me
laughing,
in the sun
and snow,
because you are sure
that there is beauty
beyond the wreck.
Because you know
that the wreck
is not a wreck at all,
but a life
pieced back together.

Then I wonder
if I truly need
to be saved,
or if I am simply asking
out of habit.
Tuesday, August 2nd 2005 @ 8:39 PM
Posted by Anonymous:
The words you said,
They should be called knives,
‘…and he launched his knifes towards her heart, blades first.’
the things you said,
i won’t ever forget.
i know from the tears that drip of their own accord,
even when i daren’t blink.
i know from my paralyzed limbs
and the slackness of my face,
i know from the rage that has dissipated,
where there is now only grief.
i know because i watched as your knives shot out of your mouth,
with purpose,
blades first.
Wednesday, August 3rd 2005 @ 1:56 AM
Posted by Leigh:
Was going through old writings and found this. Thought I’d share.

Dreamer
By: L.B. Carter
(October 23, 2004)

I am not one
to fall too easy.
I am not one
to let it go.

I am not one
to believe and see.
I am not one
you get to know.

I’m more given to
try to burn through you.

I am one who
pushes firm limits.
I am one who
turns on the harm.

I am one who
just won’t call it quits.
I am one who
scoffs at the charm.

I would like to believe
my wall will stand strong.

In my life I
have done more than most.
In my life I
live on the edge.

In my life I
am not one to boast.
In my life I
take a dark pledge.

I am intensely scared
I’ll run out of time.

In my mind I
am something wanton.
In my mind I
am much stronger.

In my mind I
put the pressure on.
In my mind I
will go on longer.

My face is a mere mask
hiding my nature.

In my nights I
kick and roll about.
In my nights I
feel more vital.

In my nights I
sing and laugh and shout.
In my nights I
hold no title.

My dream time’s desperate
because I sleep deep.

In my dreams I
fly without caution.
In my dreams I
love without end.

In my dreams I
am the girl within.
In my dreams I
ride on the wind.

When I don’t dream at all,
is when you’ll know me.

Copyright©2004 Leigh Barbara Carter
Wednesday, August 3rd 2005 @ 6:18 AM
Posted by robynn:
here is an old one i dug up…
*be kind regarding my spelling and grammar…

I have found myself emeshed in the disconnect between body and mind,
there are others with me-cold and hungry pilgrims-fumbling toward complete self annihilation,

Some turn back as the passage narrows and unknown shadows filter the vanishing light ahead, those who proceed must do so alone, the journey becomes solitary.

One weaves surreptitiously through the trees, pine needles and moss under foot, bloody hands groping for some logical configuration of matter.

the search party catches up to some, contorted faces, vacant eyes, kicking and screaming as they are pulled from the path. Some will escape their captors–while others becomes masters of placation, gaining the trust of those that imprison them so they may slip into the darkness once again- pushing toward their destination-possessed.

there are those who appear in the distance, from the fog up ahead –, they have seen where the road ends, the cognitive split, the deception–their skeletal figures–tremble, their faces wear the stain of exhaustion, unsure of the vastness before them, frightened by the onslaught that lies ahead…
Wednesday, August 3rd 2005 @ 8:34 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
do you remember that day we rode up the highway in your dad’s pick up truck?
the plains were silent as your voiced punched through- “GODAMMIT-FUCK-A-DUCK”.

I remember watching you without judgement or curiousity,
i just felt awe-struck by the sky and your voice as we passed on to the city,

then i remember thinking ‘gee, times like this life can be great’,
even in these times when there’s only the mundane and you holding out an empty plate.
Friday, August 5th 2005 @ 12:29 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
You sat next to me thinking up a way to appeal,
i sat still, trying to keep a grip on the voice saying ‘it’s not real’,
i remember looking sideways at your braces,
trying to select the best of many faces.
if only this game was was clean and straight,
if only you were the one written into my fate,
i wouldn’t have sit there tring to conjure up something to say,
and praying with all my faith that you’d just go away.
Friday, August 5th 2005 @ 12:36 AM
Posted by janie:
LpK, the anon who wrote “Digame” and Stacy… I love yours. Wow, very nice.
Tuesday, August 9th 2005 @ 9:43 PM
Posted by Stacy:
THE BOOK PROPOSAL IS FINISHED!!!

It’s 75 pages. It goes to my agent today. WOOOOhoo!!!

May everyone else have excellent writing days today.
Wednesday, August 10th 2005 @ 5:53 AM
Posted by janie:
yay stacy!
do i know you, or are you “another stacy”?
Wednesday, August 10th 2005 @ 4:09 PM
Posted by Carah:
I wasnt going to put my name, but then I thought to myself… why be embarassed about my writing. I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I wanted to share an example of my writing that meant alot to me.

~Emptiness~
Fear. Guilt. Hunger. Shame. These feelings infringe on the plagued body as you attempt to correct your appalling mistake with 500 jumping jacks, knowing that if you fuck them up they don’t count. You screw up intentionally, simply to start over. Every calorie makes a difference, and every decimal can bring on a bittersweet bliss or nastiest of all, agony and revulsion. You lay in bed sheltered in blankets with your hands on your hips, or your fingers wrapped around your wrists. It creates an addicting calm and a daze of euphoria that only we understand. The kitchen stands near holding your deepest passion. You can’t give in, leading to the locked up self in the piercing cold room, obsessing about your single disregarded desire. That is until you guzzle a diet glass of something to calm your senses. It’s a battle with your willpower and one you will always win. You’re achieving the impossible, and you own the secret. Bones are the finish line, whatever that means. Masochism is a gorgeous thing and you wont be victorious without perfection—the last request. The rewards are out of reach and the objective is a moving target. Just 2 more pounds times 50 and you’ve got it.

–Carah
:-?:-?
Wednesday, August 10th 2005 @ 9:24 PM
Posted by Say:
I wrote Digame. And thank you very much! I’ll post one of my new ones tomorrow, but for now I should force myself to get at least a few hours of sleep! :-p

Say
Saturday, August 13th 2005 @ 9:39 PM
Posted by Amanda R:
Something I wrote a while ago.

“Secret”

I sit across from you hoping you can tell me just what to do.
We stare for a while eye to eye.
I need to tell you the secret I hide.
I start to cry.
You ask why.
I can’t begin.
The liar in me is going to win.
The darkness is holding the light hostage beneath my skin.
I want to tell you and I’d have to explain.
But how do I explain what never should have became?
So I barely scratch the surfice never going to deep,
because I fear that you will hate me and I fear that you will leave.
So I sit across from you drying my eyes.
Saying I’m sorry I thought I could tell you my secrets and lies.
Knowing that you can’t tell me just what to do,
because I’m still to fragile to show you the truth.

Let me know what you think.

-Amanda R
Sunday, August 14th 2005 @ 7:59 PM
Posted by TAM-:
well, maybe my writing isn´t THHHHAAAAAAAAAATTT bad…so here it goes:
——————————-
i want to be you
& feel her
i want to be her
& feel you
In my skin
In yours
In Hers
It’s me. It’s me
Hidden & you know where
I’m the spark in her eyes
I’m the beating
of your heart
———————————-
Wednesday, August 17th 2005 @ 6:30 PM
Posted by TAM-:
here’s another one, just for the hell of it. but ten i´m off to bed. chan chan:

———————-
lay on the ground
stare at the sky
that cloud looks like a heart
that cloud looks like a heart
maybe the sky
could lend it to me
i’ve been looking
for a new one
lay on the grass
stare at the sky
that cloud
it looks like a herat
that cloud
it is still there
———————————–
Wednesday, August 17th 2005 @ 6:36 PM
Posted by Lindsey:
Hey everyone– I hadn’t written in almost a year, but I started again when I began reading “The Artist’s Way” (highly recommeded). I’ve found an exercise I learned in my fiction class last semester to be really fun: Someone chooses a sentence- it could be an original or from another piece, but everyone writes two or three paragraphs, beginning with that sentence. Is anyone game? I think it could be fun.
Thursday, August 18th 2005 @ 10:15 AM
Posted by Amanda R:
I’m down.

Amanda

Thursday, August 18th 2005 @ 3:35 PM
Posted by Anonymous:
Here’s a poem I wrote about a week ago…

Let me take your hand and show you a world which is all so new
Let me hold you and mend your heart which has become black and blue
Let me gaze into your eyes so beautiful and pure
Help me escape from this world so imperfect and mundane
Help me heal my own heart which has felt so much pain
Help me show you whats inside of me for that is all i want you to see

Show me the light
To help me fight
All this pain
Thats driving me insane
The shadows on the wall
Will not fall from my sight
Shine your light
Fight the shadows
Dispite your fright
You must fight the pain
Friday, August 19th 2005 @ 5:45 PM
Posted by Jessica:
I wrote this one at like 3am when I couldn’t sleep. It’s a very different style from my previous one (posted above).

Get Dark.

Just tear.
Care about these words.
Don’t emote.
Just slide beneath
Gaze up,
Foreordained
And tasting.
Taste
Every crinkle.
Get dark.
Nod knowingly.
Self-pity is
Exactly the fragrance
You were craving.
Sip it in,
–But slowly!
These branches you are passing
Never contrast
At all.
Share in their crippled grey
Be black.
Get dark.
Show life
That this feeling is your love.
That every Shallow Feign
Who boasts glee
Can never top your
Euphoric
Melancholic
Blithe.
Make Love to Melancholy.
Show life.
Get dark.
Friday, August 19th 2005 @ 6:19 PM
Posted by Janie:
“Make Love to Melancholy.”
Jessica, I love that line.
Friday, August 19th 2005 @ 10:00 PM
Posted by Ella:
I wrote this about ten months ago, & I just rediscovered it in an old notebook. I’m know I’m no poet, but I just enjoy getting my thoughts & feelings down on paper sometimes. Here goes;

‘Anaesthetise’

Test yourself
See how much you can stand
Practise until it becomes easy

Fluid seeps toward the light
Escaping the broken vessel
Rats jump from a broken ship

Patterns emerge
A game of noughts & crosses
A bar-code

Scratch and burn
Split and bleed
Dots of elixir
Turning hard before your eyes

The distant sound of a television reminds you of a life outside of all of this/Outside of this bubble

Breathe in
Let pride in your work
Seep over you
Your strength
Displayed in written form

Stop

A spark of thought strikes terror inside
Shining light on the lunacy of it all

You’ve changed

Then the spark dies
A candle snuffed by tears
And you sleep
Relaxed by the dull burn
And dream of a life that wasn’t like this
Saturday, August 20th 2005 @ 3:46 PM
Posted by Lindsey:
Okay guys- here’s a sentence for us to start with: She never knew how significant that first taste would turn out to be.

Try to write two or three paragraphs, and begin with that sentence. I’ll do the same in a few hours.
Saturday, August 20th 2005 @ 3:59 PM
Posted by Amanda R:
Okay so I had fun with this sentence I think it was a good choice.

She never knew how significant that first taste would turn out to be. She didn’t realize how long it would take to arrive at the mental state she was at prior to the engagement of this taste. She sat in total amazement vascillating from past to present, trying to reach some kind of deal with her psyche. If only she could forget the last 12years. If only the perfect combinations of thoughts and ideas came together to banish the false benefits of this taste forever. The taste was sweet at first, so sweet it kept her wanting more of that taste.
On went weeks and months of craving and giving into that taste. These turned into years and so much time lost in thoughts revolving around how to get back that sweet taste she once knew. It was all a mirage, a complete hoax, some horrible game. “What kind of sick joke is this that fate could allow?” She thought to herself. All of this time she truly believed that this taste would lead her to success and contentment, but she awoke to the truth that it only fueled her detriment and misery. It was a fallacy, a lie she had fed herself and swallowed whole heartedly. She held onto it far longer than she had ever intended to. She Spent hours convolsing with anxiety. Scratching at the surface of her mind to grasp onto the acceptance of the truth. The truth that no taste of any substance could fix or remove any problem that was already present. No matter how much more of the substance she tasted or how much or how little time passed between each occurance would or could change the outcome.
She fought for the acceptance of the truth. It was in this fight she found another truth that the lies about this taste had developed their own very loud voices. The lies would attempt to choke her at every act of honesty. She became smarter and saw the lie as it was, but as she grew smarter her lies grew more cunning and more creative. The lies started soun
Sunday, August 21st 2005 @ 5:33 PM
Posted by Anna Jean:
Here’s one of some short stories I’m writing about myself growing up. It’s about the day I realised I was fat, I don’t think it’s triggering…
~

It was a busy day in the school cafeteria, which meant three things: lunch monitors pacing nervously around the room, long lines to get lukewarm food, and the loud buzz from dozens of girls talking at once. It was the day when I realise I was fat. I was 9 years old.

The school lunch was spaghetti - sticky, lukewarm, and somewhat chunky. My favorite.

Courtney, my ex-best friend, was staring at me. She pointed at me, and whispered to her new friends. They laughed.

They were talking about me. Again. I dismissed it, as usual, and continued my lunch. Spaghetti is more important than whatever they were saying.

They stopped laughing.

Courtney was sitting next to me.

“Hey, Anna!” Her voice is laced with sweetness.

“What?” I say, mid-chew.

She pushes her lunch tray at me. I eye her suspiciously. Did she put dirt in the food, or something?

“I’m not hungry today! I want you to have it!”

“Oh. Thanks!” I’m excited — I’ve never had TWO school lunches before!

I wolf down the noodles without a care. I hear giggling, more whispers. What are they laughing about now? The food tasted normal, and I would have tasted something else in the food if she put something in it…

I avoided them, staring down at my lap.

I find myself wanting to see my stomach.

Gingerly, I lift a bit of my shirt and peek at the skin underneath.

Oh, I thought. I’m fat.
Sunday, August 21st 2005 @ 7:57 PM
Posted by Amanda R:
(Oh my gosh I just realized it cut me off.)

The lies started sounding like the truth. Then she realized what the actual taste was, it wasn’t the sweet taste of the substance. It was the the choice of lies that could lead her to oblivion. If she didn’t care there could be no conflict and if there was no conflict the easier it would be to become successful and contented. Little did she know that without resistance there would be no success to be had. She felt like a fool once she saw the irony of it all. Trying to avoid any problems that may arise, and only creating years of damage to come back to. She never knew how much she could learn by pulling herself out of the wreckage her life had become. She didn’t know how much life she could have lived without obsessing over this taste. She never knew the weight of the significance of holding nothing and everything all at one time. To allow her life to rot and fall apart for the sake of a lie and a taste that leads to lies. The alternative to accept the responsibility of the lies she believed, repair the damage that was made, and teach the lessons she had learned. She never knew how significant that first taste would be. It could have cost her her life, but in the end the impact of that lesson would save many lives including her own.

The End
Monday, August 22nd 2005 @ 4:41 AM
Posted by Jessica:
Thanks Janie.
I am now living in my dorm room, away from my parents. I wrote this poem expressing some of my new thoughts and feelings.

I’ve come undone.
You thought things would get better
When Ijumped from the pedestal
But time has told me that I cannot hide.

Plagued by my emotion
And constant over-thinking
And
Quick conclusions
I’m running towards the
Light of the driveway
On my dark bedroom walls
Which mark uncertainty.

And there was never any place
For someone like me to be totally happy.

So I’d dream about things
That I could not say
And lock them up
In the wool of my burgundy sweater
And keep them warm.
For time has told me
That some things
Never do change.
Monday, August 22nd 2005 @ 2:16 PM
Posted by Justine:
Alright, here’s a little poem of mine.

A CALL

Hear the shawdows, like druken chords
with the tiny bit of resonance that is left
fragmented at the witches plea
and deafened at the sight of a woman

they lay naked in the roots of the tree
crying and wailing, making quite the scene
one-two-three-one-two-three
this is their rowing call
while eating the fruits of their father

and in delight a tresspass between
the laughing hips, the aching chest
to be a woman
laden, with our bearings

I still hear their shawdowy call
one-two-
where the last numeral fades
within my hair and head
that is what the eye blinks
with light and presence
never, let the three be

- this is pretty “out-there-ish” but lately it strikes me in such a weird way.
Monday, August 22nd 2005 @ 9:33 PM
Posted by Stacy:
Does anyone want to start a writing group where we email stuff to each other and critique it? Maybe just a very small group — 4 or 5 at first. Perhaps we could limit the first one to writers working on getting published, and then maybe the next one could be devoted to poetry, one to memoir, whatever? Would anyone be into this?
Thursday, September 8th 2005 @ 5:52 AM
Posted by cate:
i want you to know that i’ve read your book so many times that i have three-fourths of it memorized.

[there’s a light on in my room; you’re not invited.]
the carpet is a
blue green burgundy taupe disaster,
and i’m picking out the threads
in threes.

a stack of books
(dog-eared,
branded with the Dewey Decimal System and
disintegrating due to somebody else’s
carelessness)
are stacked in the corner, and
AllenGinsbergturnsthepagesquickly
to escape (me)
the mess.

(edit yourself)
i am no hallucinating amnesiac,
no screaming insomniac;
i can be whomever i choose to be:
Annie Oakley shooting cigarettes
from the hands of German princes,
Isadora Duncan dancing barefoot
to an interpreted Blue Danube
(hell,
i could be
Anastasia Romanov
if assassination by the Bolsheviks
ever strikes my fancy).

(i have a handful of valerian capsules.)
placidity-
the eventual triumph of a bickering
faery tale princess or beatnik or
another imagined identity-
has never been so
easy.
the fall from power
has never been so terribly self-indulgent.

(it’s like the way that the
last Ming emperor felt when
rebel forces climbed over the walls
of the forbidden city,
only it’s not that way
at all.)
Thursday, September 22nd 2005 @ 6:48 PM
Posted by Stacy:
I am standing outside Casa Bonita in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wearing a fuzzy pink coat and matching hat and dirty white tights that bag at the knees, drinking a Chocolate Bandito. Today is my sixth birthday. I just had enchiladas for lunch, with fake cheddar cheese, the melty bright orange kind that tastes like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. The enchilada sauce is making me sick to my stomach, but I swallow the Bandito and hope it will make the nausea go away.

I’m standing on the sidewalk squinting because the sun’s going down and my mom wants to take a picture. She wants Fleagle to pick me up. I know Fleagle from TV; he is a Hanna-Barbera Banana Split. But his costume smells like it’s been in storage for a long time, like an old lady covered in mildew.

“Go on,” says my mother, nodding her encouragement over the black 126 camera I use to make photodocumentaries of my Barbies sliding down my mattress when I play avalanche. “Let Fleagle pick you up and we’ll take a birthday picture.”

So to celebrate my impending fifth year on earth, I squint into the sun, pushing away as politely far from the torso of Fleagle as possible. The camera clicks and he puts me down, but I can still smell him on me. I suck at my Bandito and wonder if my mom would let me put my coat in the car.

This is the first concrete example I remember of something initially compelling being stomach-churningly scary when you got up close. It is also the first time I used chocolate to mask the horror, but that’s another story.

I ride home in my Grandma Lucille’s station wagon, in the back where it folds down, sitting between the shopping bags with my cousins Kendra and Jason. My mom and my Aunt Linda sit on the green bench seats, distracted by conversation, so Kendra and I dare Jason to eat green onions because he’s the youngest. He’s only three so he doesn’t know yet that green onions are gross. We pull them out of the grocery bag and tell him we’ll give
Saturday, September 24th 2005 @ 9:10 AM
Posted by Stacy:
him our fortune teller cards from the machine with the glass-eyed mannequin lady. Jason wanted a fortune at Casa Bonita but he was too scared to walk up to the machine.

“Go on,” says Kendra, dangling an onion and a card in front of his face.

So he takes it, and he bites it, and our chorus of, “Ewwww, yuck,” makes my mother turn around and tell us to stop acting up right now and put the onions back in the bag. I do as I’m told because I want to watch The Waltons and call Time and Temperature when I get home.

Time and Temperature is my favorite hobby after inventing. I want to be a mad scientist when I grow up so I am practicing making charts and graphs. I call the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, where I live, and thrill to the lady with the June Cleaver voice saying, “Farmers and Merchants Bank time is…ten…oh two. Temperature fifty-one.” But the best part is that before she tells you the time and temperature, she reads a little advertisement for the bank – something like, “Farmers and Merchants Bank offers safety deposit boxes for all your valuable documents and possessions.” The ads are randomized, so you don’t get the same one every time you call; however, if you call ten times, a couple of them are bound to repeat. I keep track of the ads, writing them down as quickly as I can on a pink steno pad. I never get tired of calling; I never get tired of June Cleaver’s comforting, disembodied voice. I wonder where she is and if she’s real. I wonder if she’s a big silver robot that lives in a closet at the bank.
Saturday, September 24th 2005 @ 9:10 AM
Posted by Stacy:
oops, i meant “my impending seventh year on earth.” obviously i haven’t edited this well yet.
Saturday, September 24th 2005 @ 9:12 AM
Posted by Katie:
Ok, this is my first piece of writing I will post here.
*Takes a deep breath*

Oh, I should note, it is for my poetry class. The assignment was to imitate the style of C.K. Williams, specifically from his “Flesh and Blood” series. I was sort of basing this off of “The Critic” and “The Lover.”

I know that it isn’t going to format accurately bc the lines are so long. grrrr…
It’s 8 lines long
I guess, bear with me, try to see it..

*The Perfectionist*

She entered the building, as she always did, with a very precise task in mind that was never quite accomplished the way she had hoped for.

She walked through the door, brief case in hand with all of her oh so important materials tucked neatly inside,

kind of like her overall appearance, this neatness, her dress the perfect color and style for the season, matching her perfect slingbacks,

her hair, not a piece of it askew, as it fell perfectly to her shoulders with just the right amount of bounce and curl.

Her make-up was done just right as she took note of the tips her make-up artist friend had given her over a perfect cup of coffee one day, not too hot, not too cold,

exactly like the weather on this particular day, where the sun was also just the right amount of visible, only briefly and ever so slightly hidden at times,

never daring to shine too strong, for the sun, although perfect, was timid and terrified to shine in comparison to the perfect, yet anxiety-ridden stars,

who were apprehensively trying to keep up to the sun; all desperately trying to measure up, exactly like the perfect woman who was just walking through the door.
Sunday, September 25th 2005 @ 12:14 PM
Posted by Stacy:
I really like your piece. It’s my favorite one I’ve seen on here so far!
Sunday, September 25th 2005 @ 5:18 PM
Posted by Stacy:
Oops, that previous comment was to Robynn. Sorry!
Sunday, September 25th 2005 @ 5:18 PM
Posted by Lyndsey:
Marya, I must tell you how wonderful “Wasted” is and how much comfort I have found from reading it. My own eating disorder is still very much apart of my life, and I am far from being recovered, but dammit, I trying, and your book gave me the hope to continue trying even after most people would have given up. Okay, on to my poem. I wrote this poem after a huge painful argument with my alcoholic father, and I wishing more and more to either move out or die. I needed to write, to do something with my hands other than letting them cause destruction to my wrists and ankles. I would greatly appreciate suggestions since I have received very little feedback on any of my writing. Thanks!

“DAD”
Your presence haunts me
Everyday
I can’t escape
The pain you cause me
I never see you sober
You always lost your temper
I’m the butt of your jokes
The outlet for you anger
I close my eyes
Try so hard to imagine
Florida or Hawaii
Anywhere but here
The stench of cheap beer
And cigarettes
Wafts from your lonely room
And I, in my room
A prison without bars
Confined by a love
That doesn’t seem real
Monday, September 26th 2005 @ 10:05 PM
Posted by Janie:
Lyndsey — I liked that a lot. It flowed, didn’t take “effort” to read. That, I think, is writing’s first and foremost objective to accomplish, So.
Tuesday, October 4th 2005 @ 9:12 PM
Posted by Katie:
Corpse

Waking in darkness
As cold,
As crisp,
As crushed
As he, who
Lay beneath the ground,
Silent
Still
Stagnant
Chilled to the bones,
Or as;
Stiff and unmovable
In monumental form,
Shattered like a mirror
Whipped angrily at the wall
Upon reflection of something
You ‘d rather not see.
She weeps,
Withdraws,
Withstands, barely,
The pain of separation.
She inert in their bed
He lifeless in the Earth.
Freezing, mindlessly, she walks
To where he lay.
She brings Death with her,
He’s been keeping her
Company for a while now,
She’s ready
To give herself to him.
Not innocently
She throws herself
To Death who teases
And torments her,
Leaving her gasping and
Then giving her breath.
A sick joke.
He keeps her
Company in a tortuous
Sort of way.
Limbo has left her
Closer to him,
Farther from the life that was.
She stands over him
Cold,
Crisp,
Crushed.
She throws her freezing body
To the ground,
Desperately willing it
In all of it’s weight
to sink beneath the Earth
To be as one
Once more
Saturday, October 8th 2005 @ 12:48 PM
Posted by amy:
i found this site researching for a project and you all are really good writers, i want to put some of my work on here too.
Sunday, October 16th 2005 @ 6:54 PM
Posted by Ashley Weaver:
To A Boy

My lips were chapped, and it was snowing. You asked me about angels and I dreamt of making them in snow. Thinking about how I would look imprinted in the freshly fallen flakes, I kept you guessing with all the wrong words. “I am not a kid anymore; I am not a kid anymore.”

In a surreal haze of fast-food restaurants and pine trees, I was driving too fast. Sewage speckled my face from over the top of the car and all I could concentrate on were my fingers; pale with spider-web veins penetrating the surface as they gripped the wheel. As I skidded over the warning lines, you pulled me out if it. I heard the grinding of the wheels against the pivots and your voice in French telling me to wake.
It was tenth grade and you were just another notch on the spectrum. If I could have played you my life’s motion picture, I would have skipped that year and shown you scenes that may have helped you understand. Rewind; Play. Here I am, nine and starting puberty. I am in my basement with my uncle watching a late-night hockey game. My grandfather is dying of lung cancer; he weighs less than me. I reach for a package of crackers and he tells me not to eat past seven because you don’t burn calories at night; my mother has been dieting and has lost forty pounds. Fast-forward; Play. He visits again and tells me if he could rid the world of something, it would be fat chicks. At a restaurant, he shoves fries in my face while I hover over a salad, dipping it in low-fat dressing; my boyfriend breaks up with me; I have already lost eight pounds. Stop.
Rewind. I have already lost eight pounds.
When you came to our school, you were just a boy. A boy who wore the same shirts over and over again, but I never teased like the other kids, because I liked your muscles. I was in the 140’s then. We were in the same French class. I thought nothing of it. It was then I started to experiment: drink three cups of water; tickle the back of your throat; tie a string to a lifesaver-s
Tuesday, November 8th 2005 @ 1:02 PM
Posted by Ashley Weaver:
the rest of the story:

string to a lifesaver-swallow-pull.
Then tenth grade happened, and you were there. Throughout that year I survived on binges and coke-fasting. By October we were friends, 125. By January I had a crush on you, 114. By April you knew, 101. By May you knew something different, 97. And by June you were gone, 103.
But never really gone, you watched me through troubled eyes across the lunch room. Laughing with your friends, you would stop and peer over at me to make sure I wasn’t doing anything. Sitting there with my friends, trying to figure out how to eat a hamburger like a normal person, you just looked at me and I saw. I wanted to punch you; I wanted you to turn around. When I finally figured out that you weren’t going to stop looking, I started to fuck with your mind. Bathroom trips became habit after every consumption, because I wanted you to be scared. I switched to diet coke. I was 120.

Fast-forward. It was California and sunny; it was the last time you saw me. I hardly noticed you with that goatee. I hated you then too, because you saw me at my worst. You probably thought me a ghost; truth being I was hours away from an ambulance and artificial tubes crawling into my skin trying to feel me after a bad experience in a gas station bathroom. Weeks later, surrounded by a few other girls who sought nothing with everything attached, I told them about you instead of my uncle or my ex whom I hid puke-breath from. You; I told them about you. Pause.

I went home that night and ripped up that letter you wrote me. Torn pieces of college-ruled paper scribed with the words “Fuck”, “Die”, “Stupid”, and “You” floated in my toilet and the ink never bled. Then I proceeded with my fury and stained those pieces, the toilet, the walls, my clothes with bits of Oreo’s, Cheese Pizza, two-year old frozen muffins and three cans of coke and flushed you down the drain. You came up to me the next day; I pretended you were invisible.
Tuesday, November 8th 2005 @ 1:03 PM
Posted by tam:
Two blocks away

I walk down the street
I turn round the corner
You stand there,
Probably waiting for me
I take off my headphones
You warn me i’ll be deaf
We began to walk together now
We are both going to the same
Place
I tell you how tired i am
and you agree
then you tell me how much
you like “the smiths”
My heart beats faster,
my heart bumps
maybe your heart goes a bit crazy too
We keep silence
It’s just me & you
Tuesday, November 8th 2005 @ 2:13 PM
Posted by S.:
Just some delerium-induced prose/babbling.

The sun stares at me each and every morning, in its usual sour-faced, apathetic way, but it never listens. Then again, why should it? It has things to do. Rising, falling. Rising. Counting down the days in its own mocking, yet cleverly nonchalant way, ’till the days are gone and so is your beauty. And you never saw it coming ’cause, oh, look how pretty, that turning, whirling, flourescent pearl in the sky! And there you are, sitting on the porch drinking lukewarm coffee, talking to yourself as if someone might be listening. Reading the paper as if it might make a difference, and casually sticking a needle in your vein as if it might inject some life back into you. Oh so intriguing, this life, in its own strange and somewhat revolting way. It’s the bad car accident on the highway that you can’t pry your eyes from, that people watch in morbid fascination— who died, who were they? Oh wait, who cares! They’ll watch it on the news later. They’ll watch the starving children and sunken eyes as they binge on fast food in front of the television, thinking, ‘Oh, how sad, it’s too bad, isn’t it? Starving kids. Such a pity, but oh, I would kill to be that thin!’

It’s perfectly hilarious, this predicament we’re in called “life”. Gift-wrapped, embellished with a hallmark greeting, as if it justifies the lack of taste. But sorry, no refunds, and sorry, suicide is cheating and you know you’re too weak to do it anyway. Besides, what’s the hurry? Suicide is so passe. You’ll die, we all die, I’ll die soon enough. So relax! Let go, don’t worry about things like your family, your relationships, your career, because you’ll die either way. Isn’t it clever? Can you see the sheer cleverness in it all, the picturesque pointlessness, the great game? Dance! Dance for your gods, your puppet master, your idols made out of clay. You’ll be a Real Boy one day, maybe, for a short while, until the strings are cut and you’re just an abandoned wooden
Sunday, November 13th 2005 @ 4:23 PM
Posted by S.:
[continued]

… toy again, waiting for the Blue Fairy to come and resurrect your lifeless shell, and fulfill the distant dreams of tranquil heavens and grandiose hells. Oh, but wait—- we’re already in hell. Oops. And, oh, we’re already dying. We’ve been dying since the day we were born, in a maze of melted smiles and vaulted domes, and there’s no where else to go except deeper.

And the moon stares at me each and every night, blankly, in its weary, apathetic way. It always listens. It has nothing better to do; the stars hog the stage.
Sunday, November 13th 2005 @ 4:24 PM
Posted by joanna:
autumn.

i wait for her. she spends her sixteenth birthday writing love letters to someone who will never see them. she puts on layer after layer of mascara, until her lashes are spider-like, alluring. they distract me, sometimes, when we’re lying outside with our hands laced. she thinks i am staring down into her eyes and into her soul, which scares her, i know, but really it’s nothing as romantic as that. just her lashes, the way they curve so beautifully upwards toward the sun, like dying flowers do. everyday at 12:55 when chemistry begins, she slips into the bathroom, coughing, and huddles on the floor, cold seeping into bones as the sea seeps into the sky. this began when they started a unit on atomic structure, so she has missed how life fits together. sometimes it’s raining and she stands outside, a prophet, a ghost (i wish i could hate her), and eyeliner runs down her cheeks. through cold bare windows i stare at her back, watching the rain stream from her shoulders, willing her to love me like she used to. she never turns around.

i watch her sometimes, after school when she rehearses in the theater. she’s pretty, then. her thin hair no longer looks sickly in the bright stage lights, but gives her the air of a minimalist, as if any body to her curls would be excessive, brittle leaves on a tree in january. her eyes, the color of cigarette smoke and just as seductive, are angry, even in the love scenes. god, i wish i could hold her, maybe sew her back together. we haven’t kissed in a long time. i want to hit her.

one day, rehearsal starts late and so i have precious time with her, as we sit outside, waiting. it’s autumn; i remember past years when we would jump in leaf piles like little kids, and i would murmur poetry to her amid the auburns and burnt browns. she would shout it back, unexpectedly, yelling the words of shakespeare and woolf at the top of her lungs. her voice sounded like the ominous shadows in a cave and felt l
Saturday, November 19th 2005 @ 9:01 AM
Posted by joanna:
ike music against my skin. now, leaning against the bricks that mirror the colors of the trees, she barely whispers. i tell her how beautiful she is, that i’m renaming her juliet. she looks at me and says nothing. she makes me angry, sometimes. a leaf flutters by, the color of the sun, and she catches it in her shaking hands and holds it to her heart. i can see the veins through her skin; they are prettier than she is, frosted, quiet blue and something to make her whole. i’m hungry. there is no one around. it would be so easy.

and it is; i have her against the cement in a moment. she doesn’t even cry out as i pin her paper hands to the stone ground, unzipping and searching and fumbling in a frenzy i have never known before. i want to destroy her, i want to destroy everything that i am not, and everything that i am. i want to find truth. her hair is splayed in a stupid perfect circle around her thin face, arranged as if by a photographer, or by god. look at me, i want to cry, look at me! but her grey eyes are focused somewhere else entirely, reflecting the chorus of clouds above her head. and i want to forsake her, beneath the autumn sky. i’m glaring at her as i shove her against the cement over and over in the rhythm of the insatiable body and the corpse lying beneath it. finally, it’s over. i shudder as i let go of her hands, roll off of her. she’s bleeding, did i do that? i continue to tremble, waiting for her to break, waiting, always waiting. but she doesn’t even shiver in the cold. she closes her eyes and slowly stands, and takes my hand in hers for a moment. i turn her face to mine, and i’m crying, but she doesn’t look at me, pulling away. she holds her arms to herself, in a semblance of a hug, and walks inside, for rehearsal, i guess. i watch her back; i’m still hungry. i realize that though we are both sixteen i have just made us both much older. i’m not sorry; i hate everything about her, the way her bones slide under her skin
Saturday, November 19th 2005 @ 9:02 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
and the way her lips are always chapped and cracking and the way she stares at me or doesn’t look at all, and the way i love her.

later, i go to opening night of her show. i sit in the front row, waiting with sweaty hands as the lights dim. lying heavily on my lap are the flowers i bought her earlier, a bouquet of pinks and yellows and whites, the opposite of autumn. they are already wilting. i am trying to forget the afternoon hours before, it wasn’t real if i don’t want it to be. the curtain opens and there she is, pretty as i knew she would be. but something is wrong. most times when i see her onstage she is alive, glowing and ravenous and complete. but tonight, her skin is ashen, smooth and stony and sad. her hands are held out, she begins to speak in a clear, shadowy voice reminiscent of older times. but i can’t focus, and something is terribly, terribly wrong. it isn’t stigmata, but her hands, they’re dying. she looks dusty and in love, like a doll tucked away on a shelf and forgotten. she is shaking wildly as i couldn’t make her do before, and her hands begin to crumble- she is a leaf in the wind, grey and weightless and intangible. she’s smiling.

her hands are gone, her arms follow. it is too fast; i can’t stop her, she has taken on the persona of her cigarette smoke eyes and she is disappearing. the grains of her body fall to the stage floor like sand through fingers- she is persephone being stolen by satan, alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. wait, i want to yell. wait for me! she is crumbling too fast, and i blink to stop the tears and suddenly i am looking at empty, quiet air. she fell through a mirror, faded under the harsh lights, and there is a soft pile of ash on the floorboards of the stage.

she didn’t wait for me. i let the tears come as the flowers in my lap begin to bloom.
Saturday, November 19th 2005 @ 9:03 AM
Posted by Lo:
If a major Hollywood studio did a feature film of Center of Winter, who would be cast as the Mom? Daughter? Any ideas guys?
Tuesday, November 22nd 2005 @ 9:37 AM
Posted by Rose:
Hi Marya. I need some advice. I recently decided that I want to recover, I’ve been bulemic for a year and for the past 3 months I’ve been restricting alot. I dont know what to do. I’m so scared.
Friday, January 6th 2006 @ 3:59 PM
Posted by sarajane:
A piece of my mind- Obviously, I am not a good writer, but my thoughts still seem to end up on paper anyway. That counts for something, right?

One day,as an 8 year old, I decided,someday, I would write a memoir. Maybe a novel, and I would write of all the edifying, important experiences my life had been the past 93 years and all I had learned. But suddenly it changed, and by age 18, I decided it might be a good idea to start it sooner. I couldn’t wait for the “happily ever after” and time was running out, or at least my body was. Things changed, people changed, but I never could understand why I was still the one staring down the void of a toilet. And that bothered me. So fiction became attractive. “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Jane, and she was a beautiful, petite sort of girl, and she led a life full of pretty people, satisfying life experience, and devotion to the man she loved. She was respected by everyone she knew, and dazzled with her intelligence and beauty. She grew old and wise, with her wisdom and maturity only completing her absolute perfection.”

I have decided that this might sell, however opposite of the truth of human experience this story might be. But what is the truth?
“Once upon a fucked up childhood, there was a girl named Jane, and she was a squat and ugly sort of child. She seemed to have an eternal awkward phase, and soothed her mind with donuts and Cheetos. One day, fed up with her mother’s comments and undeniable obesity, she decided to become the opposite. She lost 90 pounds, dyed her hair, learned to apply makeup, became social, and threw up most of her food in a gas station toilet behind her middle school. Her high school years were punctuated with hospitalizations. Until one day, she got sent to a lock down treatment facility, where she saw more pain and mental disease than she would wish upon her worst enemy. She stopped eating altogether, distressed by her roommate’s slit wrists and the misery of her life. They
Saturday, January 7th 2006 @ 1:40 AM
Posted by sarajane:
(continued)
released her on her 18th birthday. She had never had a date, a high school graduation, or a normal meal over the past seven years. But she decided to start college anyway, because she was not sure she would live past 20. ”

This might sell, although I am quite sure that I prefer the first version. Truth tends to be an ugly, ironic entity that stares me down, the one that knows I was the fat child in all the pictures. That makes me tired, and God knows I can’t really afford to be tired.
Saturday, January 7th 2006 @ 1:48 AM
Posted by Carina:
The moment you threw your arms around my neck I winced
Anticipating what was coming next
I braced myself for the blow–
That knowing tone
That subtle sing-song
Sit, sigh,
Oh dear, you are so wrong
And so fragile it makes one afraid to laugh or smile.
Draw from my bottled up reserves
Take the bottle from the shelf and dust it off
You expect me to uncork salt but all that flows is acrid sweetness
Paradoxical, like I am to you-
And you ask me to look in the mirror
To remember this boy and that man and the couch and the bed and the basement
My smoky street-whore eyeliner runs
You tell me that I’m beautiful and that you will protect me
This unholy triumvirate; concerned, vocal
Yet quiet as I coerce you into lies
Reminding that I am oh-so resilient
You serve me four letter acronyms with my wine
For the one-time low price of a pre-broken pinky promise
*
“Seduction?”

How does one seduce someone
So unabashedly seductive?
Raw, red, torn flesh
Silence so loud it screams like the hiss of a whip
A flaccid body on the bed
Floating on satin and feathers
Like a coffin for the living dead
Lace, her burial gown
Noir, somehow thicker than black
Tenfold heavier than virginal white
And denser than charcoal

With what does one tempt the temptress?
Shut up, slammed doors
A veritable tempest in this bedroom
A kiss on crimson lips
Rare as red diamond
The mouth seldom traverses that sophisticated territory
Would rather narrate the nights events
In shameless vernacular
Supine sinner
Refusing to repent
Longing for lust to rise in her breast,
Make this lugubrious brothel
Somewhat bearable;
Sheets that have never known love
Bear the marks of lust –
Her soul, a bloodied effigy on his flesh
Waiting to be seduced

Comments?
Saturday, January 14th 2006 @ 6:51 PM
Posted by gracie:
A-R-T spells art.
Or pain.

Most people wonder why everything I say
is sort of a joke.
It’s true, I suppose. I never wanted to take humanity seriously, afraid it would return the favor.

I really always wanted to be
that brooding artist,
who suffers for her work.
You can see for yourself on her arm.

My pain was never so visible.
You only hear it when I laugh.
And at that, only sometimes.

Words like these still come unnaturally,
I should be so happy, out there entertaining.
All of this is too dark for comfort.

Maybe this is me…. a funny red head with an affinity for ice cream and one-liners.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I am lying.

Because I don’t really like ice cream,
It just happens to be there
And I just happen to be hurting
and somehow it feels natural to eat till my stomach hurts
and until my thoughts don’t .

And as for the one liners, they don’t work.
as least not as well as the all the food.
But they exude that personality that I wish for.

I laugh, but only because the lies are funny.
Maybe I am that artist after all.
Tuesday, January 24th 2006 @ 8:52 PM
Posted by Tam.:
“C.V”
Here i sat
Trying to write
To get all this
Out of my mind

I tried thousands of pencils
And notebooks
And now I write in a screen

I’m always the one
With the great ideas
The shameless one
Yet the shy one when
It comes to myself

I stopped a guy
In the street today
I told him “Hey,
May I have your e-mail”

It wasn’t for me actually
It was for a friend
The boy I’m in love with
Doesn’t know it yet

Every time I see him
I burst into laughter fits
I can’t go near him
And believe me
This is no teenage love
This is somewhat platonic…
Somewhat obsessive…
Somewhat in my head..

We love mostly the same things
We walk home together and I fake slightness
(just as any girl)
We see each other among English books
(I keep the inside laugh for myself)
Among pencils
(I laugh instead of weeping)
Thousands of pencils
(Ever since my childhood)
That I have tried

I remember how
Everyone would stare at me
At who I was
Now I’ve changed
But I’m still the same

The same little girl
Who cried every night
Keeping mummy & dad
From their sleep

I have in fact changed
But in fact I’m still the same
The essence is there
Come & try to take it out!
Take it Out of me

That is why I’ve sat here
To extricate my essence
To put my soul on paper
On screen

I’m afraid I can only
Write facts
Facts
Facts
Facts
Being indeed is a fact

Among pencils
(I laugh instead of weeping)
Thousands of pencils
(ever since my childhood)
That I have tried

I remember how
Everyone would stare at me
At who I was
Now I’ve changed
But I’m still the same

The same little girl
Who cried every night
Keeping mummy & daddy
From their sleep

I have in fact changed
But in fact I’m still the same
The essence is there
Come & try to take it out
Take it Out of me

That is why I’ve sat here
To extricate my essence
To put my soul on paper
On screen

I’m afraid I can only
write facts
Thursday, February 2nd 2006 @ 7:04 PM
Posted by TAM (it cut me off!):
I’m afraid I can only
Write facts
Facts
Facts
Facts
Being indeed is a fact.

——————-

Honestly i think those poems you guys post are amazing, i wish i could like my own as much…
I have pages and pages of poetry & lyrics, but i really despise them.

OH well-
Thursday, February 2nd 2006 @ 7:06 PM
Posted by Leigh:
-Flaming-

We’re just going through the motions,
you and I.
We’ll put aside complicated devotions,
to be able to deny.
Since when did pride become more important
than what we know to be true?
And when did we shut our ears off to words spent
between me and you?

When did the hands on the Clock of Fate die?

You don’t want to know what I think.
I just don’t want your excuses anymore.
I did not know
how low
you could sink.
And now it seems best to ignore…
the flames you set to these paper walls.
They’re rushing down my ancient halls.
And you’ll run from them until you tire.
You’ve left me to extinguish bitter fire.
Burning our books; burning our sheets…
Burning in neat little rows
as the fire rapidly grows.
Burning our legacy
and everything in between,
as history repeats.

Copyright©2006 L. B. Carter
Saturday, February 4th 2006 @ 2:31 PM
Posted by Anonymous:
Alone with myself another sleepless night
Nothing to left to do but cry
I hate myself all of the time
But I can never tell anyone why

When we shed some light on our darkest secrets
Those secrets start to fade away
But I can only imagine the faces I’d see
I don’t want to be looked at that way

Is this who I am, or who I’ve become?
It’s not who I want to be
I don’t know what happened, i’ve seen it before
But i swore it would never be me

I ask for forgiveness every night
I talk to God and i cry
I try my hardest just to stop
But sometimes I don’t even know why

I can’t tune out the voices in my head
I can’t see a thing through my tears
I fight with the mirror and with myself
I’ve wasted a few precious years

It stays tucked away in the back of my mind
Shows itself every now and then
I’m sorry and I will always be
But I know it will happen again.
Wednesday, February 15th 2006 @ 8:04 PM
Posted by Aubrey:
I keep forgetting to have my poetry around when I have Internet access . . . too bad . . . I’ve just written some new poems, too. Anyhow, here’s a small ditty from a couple years back I’ve managed to memorize:

~

It’s Not Enough
by Aubrey Minnick

It’s not enough to just believe;
It’s not enough to chase a dream,
For fingers ache which almost grasp.
An almost breath’s a dying gasp,
So don’t content to stay content.
An almost life is never spent
But tossed away and torn apart.
An almost story never starts.

~
Monday, February 27th 2006 @ 10:07 AM
Posted by Aubrey:
This is a compliment, by the way . . .

I’ve always been extremely critical of poetry, especially poetry posted to the Internet. All the writing sites, message boards, blogs, etc. seem to have ten million aspiring poets, out of which maybe one or two have a stitch of talent. Maybe it’s the nature of writers to seek out other writers, but for some reason that statistic simply doesn’t apply to this board. I find myself reading, relating, connecting - some more than others - bits and pieces more than entireties, but I paused MORE THAN ONCE scrolling down the page and thought, “Hmm, good line.”

Keep writing.
Monday, February 27th 2006 @ 10:20 AM
Posted by cait:
Smoke Signals

I was very small once and I used to sit by the television when my mother was ironing. She always watched black and white films and when I had grown bored of colorforms and Dr. Suess I would sit down sometimes. The characters were always black and white and it always looked like it was raining, even indoors. The men and women held long cigarettes in their smooth and dainty fingers and my mother held a short cigarette in her rough hand. I would smell it and turn and expect to see her in black and white like the smokers on television.

Saturday mornings I would wake up and wait for the faint scent of smoke to float under my bedroom door. When I smelled it I would walk outside and sit down in the far corner of the living room across from the white kitchen table where my parents sat and smoked. My mother had a cheese danish and a cup of coffee and my father had a large paper spread out and a jelly doughnut and between them there was a grey ashtray. I had books and crayons and blocks in front of me and I’d give them an obligatory shove but really I’d sit and smell and feel the presence of parents and smoke and grey ashes. Sometimes when they left the room I’d get up and stick my fingers in the ashtray and smell them. My hands were still white and pink afterward and the ashtray was still gray.

When I was eleven I walked downstairs after smelling the telltale signals of parental presence but both cars were gone and I turned my head and there was my sister with a cigarette in her hand. “If you tell I’ll beat you up” she said and I agreed and that was the end of that. I’d see her in her leather jacket walking and smoking and listening to Nirvana in her small grey cassette player and coming home smelling like smoke and my mother smelling like smoke and both yelling and grey smoke coming out of their mouths and I remember the TV was on and and some grey man with no shirt was on his knees and yelling and there was a cigarette in the ashtray and I wondered
Friday, March 3rd 2006 @ 12:14 PM
Posted by cait:
what his mother thought of him with no shirt and jazz music and if that was like Nirvana and black leather back then and right then my father walked in the door and saw me and the man on the television and my sister and my mother and he said Jesus Christ and walked outstide and it was raining and I saw him breath out grey on grey.

I’m not small anymore but sometimes I’m not as sure of that as I’d like to be. My ashtray is red. I smoke black cigarettes and white cigarettes and I don’t get as bored as I used to. Sometimes I come home and my father takes my cigarettes and I take his and we watch Marlon Brando films as long as they aren’t colorized. More often though I stay here and go to bed smelling like smoke and I wake up and smell myself and sometimes I’ll look for the ironing board or the kitchen table from four houses ago. Or I’ll try not to hear my sister and mother yelling grey smoke at one another. Then I arise fully and go to the desk and take out my notebook and my pencil and a cigarette. Sometimes I go outside and sometimes I don’t depending on whether or not there’s rain. If it looks like it’s raining inside I’ll open my blinds. Sometimes I turn on a Marlon Brando movie and sometimes I turn on jazz but usually I just sit and smoke and sometimes the cigarette will crackle and sometimes it won’t depending on whether it’s white or black. I don’t own a leather jacket and I don’t particularily like Nirvana and I don’t iron and since nobody is here to fight with I don’t fight. There are days when it doesn’t rain but the sun doesn’t come out and on those days I go outside.
Friday, March 3rd 2006 @ 12:16 PM
Posted by Jen:
why do you always feel so good
belittling me and making me cry?
hurting me, not wanting me
making it obvious
you regard me as the offsping that went wrong?
Sunday, March 12th 2006 @ 6:58 AM
Posted by Felicity:
…sometimes I do…I think I’m mad. Worrying that the sky may fall and the brilliant blue will shatter into millions of pieces…and the stars will draw blood as they wing themselves past me.

And sometimes I cry into the silence of the night, my sorrow echoing and dancing through the shadows. Sometimes dancing a fast tango, eager to reach hell…others clinging at my heart, squeezing every last out.

I cannot always feel this way, can I? Dreams try to steal me away - have you ever been to Dreamland, I wonder?…as far as it is to the moon, but if the fairies take you, you’ll be safe as a dead butterfly, it’s soul gone to rest. Wonders await you in that beautiful land, a place where nothing goes wrong, anything is possible. You can fly if you want,…you have love…and what could possibly generate more love than love from love itself?

If people say you’re crazy, then they know nothing. Their imagination is clearly far removed from their soul…like death in the wind - black, charred, toxic. You cannot diagnose. To diagnose is to cause death - an ending for all, an escape from the light of the world. It’s as fatal as letting Hannibal Lecter slice open your head and roast your brain. Because, like his victims, you will swallow anything, puppet like.

I refuse to be tied to pieces of string, moved by some corrupt force. Do to me what you will, but don’t steal my mind. I cannot live without my mind.
Thursday, March 30th 2006 @ 5:19 AM
Posted by Nahrin:
Drunken Poetry

The cherry poison
Floats in the clear ocean
The apple’s glow
Catches her eye.
The suicide files
Are up on her wall
The rose’s red pedals
Fall to the ground
In slow motion.
She stands on the edge
Her arms wide spread
She smiles, letting go.
Her tears still linger
In the vacant rooms
Intoxicating fire
Burns beneath her eyes.
The pen glides
Over pieces of paper
She writes
Her tragedies
Her drunken poetry
She calls it.
I remember her smiles
I remember her words
I remember everything
And I remember forgetting.
The poison
The files
The apple
The poetry
It’s all locked
In my small box
Of absent dreams.
Thursday, April 20th 2006 @ 3:28 PM
Posted by anonymous:
I stare out of my meaningless window. Searching for what people called the pleasant afternoon breeze. I think it took a vacation. Ran away from me.
The monotonous wind plays with the hair that falls across my face. I lean my forehead against the cool glass. I can feel them standing behind me. My own poem repeats itself into me head… with his alluring voice.
Train ride…
That’s where I was
Running away from you
On a train ride.
And I watch it all
Go a blur
Right in front of my eyes
The train had no wish to stop
The train cackles at my
Spiraling desperation
And the wind
Oh that manic music
That kills my silence
How it mocks me now.
Train ride…
That is how I came to be
The unfaithful draft that now
Teases your soft cheeks
And your insincere eyes.
I should’ve known he was a hypocrite. That everything he said to me was a lie. I hate myself for what I did.
I fell, smiling to myself, thinking there was no ground to hit. But to my great displeasure, there was. It is rigid. Sharp metal thorns stick up at me. Slowly they strike my body. Leaving me breathless and vacant.
I laugh to myself as a tear falls down my expressionless face.
I feel her hand on my shoulder, I pull away from her. I do not want her company. I do not want anyone. Ever.
“Go away.”
I hear her stifled, pitiful footsteps back away from me. Leaving me in my state of wretchedness and insignificant lament.
I know I am pathetic. But what am I doing? I cry. I try to forget what happened. What he did to me, but I cannot.
I did not tell anyone what He had done to me.
But they caught me. Caught me in the bathtub, fully clothed with my wrists oozing blood. I saw her hard green eyes look at me in fright and disappointment.
I let them stitch my cuts. I let them tell me it was a stupid suicide attempt.
But they did not know. I did not want them to know.
I did not want myself to know what He really did to me. But there was no escaping it. No evading my screams and yells. No dod
Thursday, April 20th 2006 @ 3:31 PM
Posted by anonymous 2:
No dodging his devious and disgusting smirk. No avoiding the scars he slashed across my heart.
“You were never pretty to me. Never will be to anyone.”
Those were his last words to me. His last appalling words that left me feeling hollow.
They noticed that I had stopped eating. Noticed that I wore long sleeves, during summer. Noticed the dried tears on my cheeks. His words would never depart me, singing foully inside of me eternally.
I’ll never hurt you baby, I swear.
But didn’t everyone say that now? I could never trust anyone. Never look or think of anyone.
I would go on my fantasy train rides. Where the train took me to inconceivable places. Far away from Him. From everyone who wanted or pretended to want to help me.
I still look out of my window. I still play my piano. But with no essence. No emotion. Nothing.
I watch the sun take a wasted dive into the make-believe line that I will never call horizon.
I have never wished for anyone to die. I have never wanted anyone to be hurt. But now I wanted him to scream the way I did. Wanted him to die. Wanted blistering knives to slice through his unpleasant, soiled, numb layers of skin.
I smile as I envision him writhing with pain. Burning alive and calling my name. And I screech at him chaotically. Throw myself in the fire as well.
I begin to think that I have to reason to live anymore.
Slit wrists will not kill you all the time. Because it was not my wrists or blood that he did it to. But to me. My naive shaken mess of a body.
He raped me. I could do nothing about it. I could not cry it out. I could not bleed it away. I could not burn it alive.
I turn around and say
“Something did happen… and I need to tell you.”
Because I know that’s exactly what needs to be said. And my mind needs to shut up and stop saying his name, telling me to carve it into my skin so that I’ll never forget. Even though forgetting is exactly what I want to do. But cannot. Because things like that happen, and y
Thursday, April 20th 2006 @ 3:32 PM
Posted by anonymous 3:
and you don’t forget about them. Especially when they happen more than once.
Thursday, April 20th 2006 @ 3:33 PM
Posted by mel:
cait.. i love it.
Thursday, April 27th 2006 @ 10:07 PM
Posted by kristin:
On Behalf of the Cruel

On behalf of the cruel -
That is, to say, the elites
(who inevitably are)
incapable, unwilling, and/or lacking
the ethical reasoning needed at those
crucial moments of
eager raw tenderness
an exposed soul
bears before them
(those delicate fragile beings,
searching for approval, acceptance,
know not that they search in vain -
where they look no souls exist
who would take them in)
to suppress the urge to evoke
their self-endowed
powers of control
(amounting to nothing more
than a vacuum specializing in
sterilizing themselves of
faulty human traits such as
sympathy)
and surrender any inhibitions
they may harbor towards their
beloved sport of
building empires on the backs of
the broken and the suffering
whom they have placed
low on the caste system,
and take time to enjoy
ripping a new one
for each mortal they render
unworthy of anything more
than psychological abuse
for four (or 6 or 7 or 13)
long, arduous,
torturous, merciless years;
all this taking place on that
daunting rock
whose very surroundings crush
if not freeze
those daring enough
to attempt escape from
sadistic punishment
for their very existence -

On behalf of the cruel -
(from one who has played
both master and slave
to the system
I will not deny that
I have sampled both sides
and found none to my liking
I worn the masks of
ambiguity and hypocrisy
I have not, when slapped
by the hand of High School’s Finest,
turned my cheek - I instead
circled ’round and made a
cycle of it: slapping, turning,
slapping, turning, hurt ricocheting
like music off of empty walls
resonating louder and louder
till at last - it fused - and
one person took the brunt of it -
but to whom can the most fragile
of us continue the chain?
They endure it, they bruise,
they suffer tenfold
what we’ve suffered
and it is they to whom
I address this -

for every and anyone who
has been a victim of
Friday, April 28th 2006 @ 11:55 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
the world’s malice
for every boy or girl
who has survived (or didn’t)
another’s intent to hurt
for those trapped within the system
for those who became the
designated scapegoat
for every heart, wrenched out, beaten
emptied of any
blood tears emotion
for those who dared to go
against the flow
take this into your heart - )

On behalf of the cruel:

I apologize.
Friday, April 28th 2006 @ 11:56 AM
Posted by randomosity:
Melancholy and Scorn sit together at the table, glaring at each other, never looking away, even as Beauty entered. Melancholy, so pitiful, lonely… yet fiercely sinful in his core. Not many knew of the affair had occurred between him and Jealousy. Of course, everyone knew Jealousy for her errant behaviors. Her latest pray was no other than Scorn.
Melancholy was a brilliant artist, frowning, a few tears here and there as Scorn gulped down the alcohol, burning his despicable throat. No one dared cheat Scorn, unless you wished for death. It was pure suicide.
Vindictiveness casts his shadow upon them, Treachery on his arm, what a surprise. The bartender, Compassion, was now looking up from his newspaper. It wasn’t very often that action arose in this peaceful town.
Darkness illuminates the emotions inside the little boy’s imagination. He squirms in his sleep, begging Bliss and Pleasure to stop fighting about their “obvious” differences.
But the little boy was not little at all, a sinner, a liar… He earned this. The uncomfortable nights, the boundless battles inside his chaotic psyche. The gratifying pain.
This was fair punishment.
Sunday, April 30th 2006 @ 2:11 PM
Posted by Jessie:
I am an artist, and poet. I am fourteen. I have.. fallen into that pit of rickety addiction to thinness within the past three years. There have been times where I’ve gotten better, times where, i’ve been healthier, and times of intense self-revulsion.

However, I am doing my best to recover, and a year ago, I wrote a poem for my friend which somehow gave her a strong leap of faith to help her cope with her bulimia. My poetry can be found here — flappability.deviantart.com

RELIFTED
Through stitched open eyes –
we saw the mirror
Shatter into our Hearts.

Each broken piece — a throbbing reason
to melt away
the heavy Cage
around our souls.

.

But as Time paddled on,
things have changed.
And now I wallow –
with a guiltless stomach
of nutmegged Durian,
Wondering Why It Started.

Did the wist to camoulflage
make our heart-beats spin?
Did the clouds clap too loud?
Did the avalanche of cotton opinions
pin us to the ground?

Or did our own time-spun tufts
of self-revulsion
disintegrate the pounds?

.

Behind vanishing bars
of our fading Cages
I slowly swerved to see –

the Destroyer of our Confidence
as the Protector of our Souls.

the Body has become a Cage,
because we made
it tha
Monday, May 22nd 2006 @ 10:43 PM
Posted by Jessy:
the Body has become a Cage,
because we made
it that way.

When its Dissipation rolls to an End –
Nothing’d be achieved.
Just some twisted happiness
and a life that never breathed.

.

Now as the pages thin
I’m wondering Why –
those rusty dreams
keep dangling
from your eyes.

My Heart was perched
so Close to yours –
we were diminishing Together.

But with a squirt of Faith
and a deafening splatter –
I squeezed through the escape.

.

So I am sorry that
you’re still plastered there
because I pray for you
Everyday.

A stroke of faith
is what it took for me
and I hope you’ll find it too.

.

So you can continue
struggling on –
to whisk away the pounds

Or you can just admit
that it’s alright –
Relift the stars
Monday, May 22nd 2006 @ 10:44 PM
Posted by jessy:
Relift the stars
and see them fling
your shattered heart

into the Beautiful.
Monday, May 22nd 2006 @ 10:44 PM
Posted by Mirana:
“straight edge”
i don’t know if it was
the hickey hugging her neck
or the
hair on her head: a let down mohawk
like black smoke from a factory pipe
but i was hit
struck across my face with admiration
she killed the cig on the hot side of the trash can
she named herself “sorry”
we sat at the bus stop
the sun slicing our eyeballs

i swallowed her tobacco scent
and became an addict
and i asked her for a camel
she didn’t know i was a smoker
so she put in between my fingers
my first cigarette
i slid it under my nostrills like a
black and white flapper girl
i was suprised with how much it smelt like prunes

and i smiled at my first big catch
my first big fish
Friday, May 26th 2006 @ 4:47 PM
Posted by Sofia.:
This is a piece I wrote just having returned from a close friend’s funeral. He was fourteen years old (Gulliver Boland, born March 15th, 1991, died October 14th 2005). It’s about his mother that day.

She weeps,
mother
She, the bulbous queen bee
Dollops of heavy tear thomp to
the feathered dirt ground
that blankets her only son -

She makes haggard animal noises
Muffled by a
birthfriend’s shoulder
like a sock in her throat

She cries, too pained to wonder
how little white pills could
render her only son
lifeless -

His bones do not stir underground
She will never watch him
Run
again
and all of his awkward
adolescent dreams leak from him -
soaked up by dirt

His childish jives
cease
as she had always requested

and somehow the air feels
too clear
without him coughing in it
Friday, June 9th 2006 @ 9:54 PM
Posted by Meghan:
I wrote this back in 2002 when the love of my life lost his battle with C.F.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He sat down on the edge of the bed next to me. He took my hand in his and with his other gently rubbed my face. I opened my eyes to see his smiling face staring down at me. I started to say something but he put his finger up to my mouth and softly kissed my forehead. He whispered the words of love into my ear.
“I love you, “ he spoke. “I will never let you go. We will be together for eternity and always be there when you awake in the morning. Meghan, I will always love you and never stop.”
My face was streamed with tears, never had anyone said those words to me. He took his hand and gently wiped away the tears. Again I began to speak, but yet again he stopped me.
“Never again will you be lonely,” he whispered. “Never again will you be heartbroken or left behind. You will never lose me or wake up alone. You will never have to worry about anything again. I will be here to take care of you, hold you, and love you. We will do everything together, see the world together.”
He was the most beautiful person to ever be in my life. He was beautiful both inside and out. I didn’t understand how someone as perfect as him could love me. I had never felt love before until I found him. I wanted to say something, anything to him, but he again stopped me.
“There’s no need for you to say anything,” he started. “I can tell by your tears that you feel the same. Before I met you, I didn’t believe in true love or a soul mate. But you changed everything for me. You are my other half, Meghan; you are my one true love. People spend their entire lives looking for what we have. Every time I look into your eyes, I fall in love all over again. You know that I would not and could not ever hurt you?”
I sat up and buried my face in his chest. He put his hand on my chin and lifted my face up. He gently pressed his lips to mine.
After the long and passionate k
Tuesday, June 27th 2006 @ 6:15 AM
Posted by gish:
What an awesome idea.I only recently impelled myself to try my hand at fiction,poetry,something.Hey,if I like reading it so much,how hard can creating it be?PSHAW.

I just now found your journal,though.So I am new (I guess,how does this place work..),and think I will save my adoration for another thread.In the meantime I thought I might as well contribute…maybe because I’m so nervous about letting anyone else see it!I’m sure everyone here’s familiar with the rabid “IT’S NOT FINISHED!!!” syndrome.But here is my untitled snippet.Please keep in mind,if anyone may read this,I am 16 and this is my first ‘finished’ attempt.
————————
Competent. She closed her eyes and inhaled the word’s meaning, feeling a sweet, defeated ache in her chest that finally forced her to tear away her attention from the present, but instead of concentrating it on her task, had decided to let it go altogether. Her face parallel to the window now, determined on allowing herself only to experience the scenery, she let out a short, exhaled chuckle at the thought the she could be almost glad. The move had stopped seeming like a new beginning, and now was slowly absorbing itself into the present, which made it hurt all the more. She knew there would be no excitement, no new nothing. Only silence, shuffling feet, boxes and couches…but that was too much to think about. Optimism introduced a wide opening at the end of a tunnel that was much too idealistic to get stuck in. Realizing this, she felt herself falling through the tunnel backwards as it got narrower and narrower, darker, until she slipped through the pinhole-sized entrance and dropped back into herself.

She tried to do what she did when they took off. She could concentrate on nothing more than nothing and essence. Splitting her eye’s perspective diagonally, threefold between the black interior of the car door, the side upper part of the driver’s seat, and the view outside of large grey-blue clouds, fields, and d
Friday, July 7th 2006 @ 10:49 PM
Posted by gish:
Oops.Didn’t know that would happen…the rest of what I had,just so it’s not so annoying and disjointed:

- and dense, black-green forest some distance off, she pressed her fingertips to the cold window and raised herself up on the seat more. Then she leaned her head on the window, looking up and out, trying to align facts and anecdotes of geophysics and ecology in her head…the ones she had learned in her favorite Science class (trying not to think any more specifically than this) where she broke down order into more order, to the primordial nature and order that always made her think of the things that were rushing by her now.

It was working, some. The cold window, her equally cold breath against it, and the air whipping by outside formed into a bubble-like, timeless oasis, with the impressionistic sky as a perfect backdrop, a see-through boundary.

Good, she thought, keep working on it.
Friday, July 7th 2006 @ 10:52 PM
Posted by Robin:
A poem.

It took no time to know:

That between these tendril capes of breath and bone,
Estranging in your wake to drift and roam,
There holds life and love amid my vacant arms, my sated chest,
With mind to shelter, resuming to their rest.

That there is nothing to resist, within this hallowed space,
Doubts and strains, dispatched, disturbed, displaced,
To make good room for all that shining we’ve got planned,
The winnow of the heart a breeze to savour, as only lovers can.

That the stretch of time through which we pass,
Is fractioned in circumstance, first and last,
Fuck fate or reason or trouble or cost,
May not a chance, nor second glance, of you be lost.
Wednesday, July 26th 2006 @ 2:00 AM
Posted by Tam:
Gish! i cant believe how similar that not-finished-story is to one i wrote some time ago. I’m also 16 and that story was my very first “serious” work.
I even howed it to my friends-which i had never done before & the internet does not count-
i would post that story of mine, but i did it in spanish and have absolutely no will OR intention to translate it.lol.

–
I loved yr poem robin, the last verses.

i’m off to sleep.
adios.
Saturday, August 5th 2006 @ 8:21 PM
Posted by Darcy:
This poem isn’t actually specifically about an eating diosrder, even though it’s got that good old school female personification thing going on. More about that same nagging, darker feeling I get in winter that reminds me of what it used to be like. But it’s more about general negativity, I guess.

Her

She is waking. I can feel her stirring in half-sleep,
Breaths quickening against the inside of my skull.

All day I have sweared into my own cold hands.
I have bantered the bulk of my ugly memory—

Library of spite—and have somehow stumbled
Upon a wake-up call. Because now there is a softness,

A thaw. She has yawned, swallowing the consonants.
My soft palate stretches in preparation, makes the bed

Of my mouth, and ceremoniously begins to welcome her.
She likes the poetic tragedy of these city streets.

I can hum nothing but chaotic, rythymless things tonight
Because those are the kinds of songs that she likes.

Evening is even more hatefully chilly than the day
And I dread it but it makes her deliciously restless.

And while I play the statue in my frigid, marble skin,
She chatters and shivers and dances like the bones.

And while I sink back into the flood of dark months
She is the one who will spit on the frosted ground.

She will learn the names of all the dead flowers.
She will even sing back the lovesick tunes of summer

In the background, as I go on humming her chaos for her.
Saturday, August 12th 2006 @ 10:20 PM
Posted by Kerianne:
Fighting again, same lousy argument, same stubborn stances, same person right (him) – same person wrong (me).
“I just can’t touch you?”
“Right.”
“Except sex”
“Except sex.” I agreed. He frowned angrily. “It’s different.” I attempted at condolence, cold condolence.
“Hm?” He was challenging me. Open up; use your words; don’t run. All the stupid phrases I’d heard before and never conquered. I paused for a moment and felt a chill when I remembered that he was waiting for an answer.
I stumbled. “Because… it’s different”
“You said that.”
“Stop! God. …it’s fucking, it’s banging, it’s getting laid. It’s not… sentimental.”
“Oh Christ. Right, because there’s NO such thing as romance or emotion or feelings, huh!?!”
“Yep.” I was simply being defiant now. Stubborn, he’ll call me on it.
“You’re twisted. This isn’t right. You’re lying and you’re wrong and you’re fucking MEAN.”
I was suddenly overwhelmed by guilt. Guilt… why? He wasn’t anything special. I mean, what’s a couple of months? What’s losing my virginity? What’s anything? I had done something wrong: I had hurt someone else, someone who was theoretically supposed to be important. But that’s only for people that are alive. I just take their cues.
This is the part where the girl is supposed to apologize and to mean it. I’m halfway capable.
I mumbled an apology and told him to give me a minute. He looked unamused yet had that same old wanting-to-help-or-hoping-that-I-could-be-sincere-this-time look.
I tried to think up a quick lie; something that wouldn’t be on a tv show, something that a real person would really feel and could really portray.
I faltered: “I didn’t mean it to be mean. I just (I pause for a few thick seconds) don’t see sex (cue chewing on my lip cutely) as intimate as …other things.” I quickly finished up, eager to be done.
“What other thing
Monday, August 14th 2006 @ 4:50 PM
Posted by Kerianne:
“What other things?” I was somewhat successful and it fueled my manipulation. He had softened, the tension had peaked and we were on our way down. The cycle that I once thrived on. I interrupted myself as I got lost in the thought of that I could possibly still thrive on that same thing. I made sure my face looked like I was embarrassed and perhaps even a bit confused by the question: it would buy me time for my wandering mind.
“talking” I said. “It takes a lot more effort to share thoughts than to share body parts and pleasure.” I knew with the word “pleasure” he would subconsciously focus on it for a bit, excited that I saw sex as pleasurable.
I thought up what else I could say. I was sick of the truth; I felt like just bringing the fight to a close and then get started with the passionate path to sex.
I knew by this point that I couldn’t make the move just yet, it would be obvious that I was wrapping things up too quickly in an effort to shut up the actual issue with the filler.
I humored him with talk for a few more minutes and then started making cute faces, cocking my head to the side while I explained viewpoints, acting completely unaware of my expression when he called me out for being adorable. I pretended to blush, and I looked down and half laughed.
I raised my eyebrows at him in a challenge, as if to suggest that he was straying from the point. He mocked me with his eyebrows and I let my head fall in a petite laugh into the mattress. I looked up with a straight face, erupting into a smile: all planned out. Be cute and be flirty; be coy and not overzealous. Let him feel like he’s making the moves. If he thinks that he’s the one advancing, I’ll get laid. If he knows what I’m looking for – he’ll push off.
We made faces at each other and called each other playful angry names. I pretended to be offended by one and scrunched up my face real good, to which he repeated. I furrowed my brow further and lea
Monday, August 14th 2006 @ 4:51 PM
Posted by Kerianne:
leaned in closer. He copied. Our foreheads touched. I scrunched up my eyes tighter but let my lips fall looser (tight lips aren’t cute).
I stared straight at him. I was forward when I pushed the very tip up my nose up to his, so that it ran across for not quite a second.
He cocked his head to the side and let his face muscles relax. I pretended to be questioning but I had played this scene all out in my head back before we even started to fight. I was winning; I knew where this would go. But to him, I was clueless.
In a quick movement his right hand held the back of my head and we kissed a glorious victory. Delicious win. I watched myself from above, happy that the body can continue without the brain present. He was kissing me. My body was kissing back. I felt nothing.
I swam my hands up his tight arms and we undressed the sexiest we could, attached at the mouth and all.
Nearly complete, I just needed penetration. Preparation, I gave him the shifty eyes and he knew what I meant. Suited up, slowly in. I melted, everything I was waiting for. Everything that I had prepared for. That sweet moment when I won.
I had exited my body but quickly leapt back in. It wasn’t over, I had to ride, I had to feel every possible second that my mind would be quiet enough to let me. I heard my own noises sometimes and thought I was being ridiculous. I wondered how it was working my ab muscles. I wondered where I’d be sore the next day. I basked again in the glow of success.
I felt his body and he pumped. I responded: verbally, physically – all but emotionally. Did he not feel that? I became disappointed with my heartlessness but was struck back with physical feeling: this is what sex is about. Remembering what it was like to live, to feel without thinking, to experience without analyzing.
“It must be wonderful to be this way all the time.” After we finished, we laid and I ran my fingers on his chest, though not to tickle, and I in
Monday, August 14th 2006 @ 4:52 PM
Posted by Kerianne:
I instead thought “how horrible it must be to have emotions and feelings that get in the way of this.”
After the afterglow wore off, I started fidgeting. I didn’t want him to touch me. I watched him fall asleep and I thought how easily fooled. I shifted over so that I could be the observer again. His fingers betrayed when they rested on me. I felt like claiming my territory.
When he woke, I explained that I had already napped. I’m sorry if I woke you. I tried to make the voice sound loving like the movies do. I smiled and began to dress.
The blankets and the mattress and the boy felt heavy with their attached expectations. I wanted to think of a reason to go.
Instead, I let him hug me tight before I was fully dressed. Maybe, I thought as I pressed up against his exposed penis, we could fuck again from this position. I twisted my neck and kissed him while gently rubbing up against him as though it felt like Heaven.
It didn’t felt. I didn’t felt. I just wanted the penetration, the climax, the afterglow. One more time. Get your hands off me.
Monday, August 14th 2006 @ 4:53 PM
Posted by Kerianne:
Im so sorry that took so many posts! If you want to delete it, thats fine. I just didnt want to leave it half finished.
I dont think its triggering?? I hope not; sex is a totally seperate addiction for me so I didn’t think that much of my eating disorder got into this piece.
Monday, August 14th 2006 @ 4:54 PM
Posted by Tatiana:
Here’s a short one that has nothing to do with EDs.

“spring”

when you latched the gate
the salt came after you, screaming
to be stomped and smothered

but trees were blooming, battered
toys on sleepy-sand grass, and your
white whip was in pieces on a tricycle
Thursday, August 31st 2006 @ 6:02 PM
Posted by canyglower:
I just wanted to say -

Darcy,your poem is incredible and encompasses a wonderful idea that i cant stop thinking about.much luck to everyone - i was only on here a few moments - and Tatiana,i like your poem a lot as well,it reminds me of Broken Social Scene lyrics for some odd reason.

Sunday, September 3rd 2006 @ 5:22 AM
Posted by Cheryl:
I find writing poems very therapeutic - it gives me an arena to sort of collect everything together and make sense of it. This is one I wrote about inpatient treatment. Hope you like it X

The Ward

On the ward, their wispy limbs
make little fuss. All quiet, all slender atrophy.
All insect-eyed and fawn-gangly.
All subdued modern art and stark biology.

Bleached as bone, they reinvent themselves
in angley solos, sharp knees and elbows
drawn, keen weaponry. And their slow smiles
like razors, rusty and dangerous.

They look more than anything like
small caught mice hollowed out
by a thorough knife. Emptied
of soft innards, taut corpses reversed,
easily as gloves: everything inside
made gruesomely public.
Friday, September 8th 2006 @ 4:37 AM
Posted by cheryl:
When I get stuck for material, I often like to get inspired by a piece of art, a photograph, or a quote, and usually find that it frees me up. I wrote the following piece about a lovely old black and white photograph – it was a female statue in what appeared to be a graveyard, gazing wistfully over at a male statue which was looking away in the opposite direction. It was titled ‘Longing’, and was sort of sad and beautiful and tragic and depressing and human all at the same time.

Longing
Brought to commissioned fidelity from old stone, she lies
in wistful weather-permitting permanence, bunched in the stern folds
of her eternal dress and lovely in her dolour. Courted by worms and earth,
she has refused their eager suit, giving them instead
her two eyes, dull as pennies, preferring
her new immoveable eyes, adoring, absolute, and fixed like the stars
of her unavoidable fate, an Arundel Tomb

revisited and revised: puppy-less, unmarried, set
together in the same, slow, gradual decline and similarly dressed
by the clockwork seasons in uniform robes of root and leaf,
the shawlings of the Christmas ermines
softening their frozen shoulders –

no life, no loss, no technical grief, but,
immaculate as Juliet, how tragic she is! Recumbent, devoted, unrequited;
virgin to all touch but the sun’s conciliatory hand.
Friday, September 8th 2006 @ 8:36 AM
Posted by Tatiana:
Cheryl: Wow… I think your poetry is fantastic. I especially liked the poem you wrote about inpatient treatment. I’ve never been inpatient for an eating disorder (though I have been in for depression/BPD), and this description of a ward of eating-disordered folk fascinates me.
Saturday, September 9th 2006 @ 6:40 PM
Posted by cheryl:
Tatiana: Thank you very much for your kind comments. I was a bit wary of posting the one about the inpatient treatment as I didn’t want to put something out there that people might find triggering. But that poem is meant to be a (very brief) reflective look at inpatient treatment through the eyes of someone who is realising that it’s actually not a very nice state to be in – it’s not the romantic fading-away, all moon-eyed and listless and pale, that people often think it is. So I think it’s ok to include it on here…

Do you do any writing yourself? Apologies if you’ve said that somewhere on here already, I haven’t actually read all of the blogs yet. I write poetry, some short stories (which I’m terrible at, but which I really want to do, so I keep plugging on hoping I’ll improve with practice) and would love to write a book someday. What about you?
Monday, September 11th 2006 @ 4:20 AM
Posted by Tatiana:
I write pretty much just for myself. I used to consider myself a “writer” of sorts, but I’m not sure I’d apply that title to myself anymore. I did post a poem here, though… the one called “spring”.
Friday, September 15th 2006 @ 9:32 AM
Posted by cheryl:
I wrote a sestina, yay for me! Am experimenting with form poetry at the minute as I find that structure helps me write when I’m stuck. A sestina is basically 7 stanzas with 10 syllables per line. The words that end each line in the first stanza then form the endings for the lines in all subsequent stanzas in a specific order…I think I made that sound more complicated than it actually is, but whatever!

I’ve always been drawn to Greek and Roman mythology – I remember one of the first library books I ever loaned was a complete index of myths, and I pored over it obsessively. I always thought the story of Echo and Narcissus was haunting and sad. I think the contrasts in the story are really touching: the beauty of Narcissus contrasting with Echo’s complete lack of physical presence, Echo’s total, unfaltering love for another contrasting with Narcissus’s self-love…and the fact that Echo only ever loves him for his beauty, which is ultimately the undoing of them both.

To be insubstantial is not easy.
This is what the girl thought, mooning by the
glass pond she could not touch, let alone break,
her beautiful face the mere echo
of a girl’s face, a ghost’s face looping
from day and dark like spider-silk. She

was one of mythology’s cursed; she
was confined to parroting the easy
speech of others, end-words only, looping
back and back on themselves in circles, the
lariat loops of pond ripples. Echo-
christened, echo-voiced: she felt her heart break

a little each time she couldn’t speak, break
like chipped ice. There was nothing that she
could do other than attend him. Echo
his footsteps, watch him filter an easy
smile into the water. He lay on the
bank, flushed and smiling, casually looping

glossed hair round a finger, neatly looping
a lock round each ear. She wanted to break
the quiet with a lion’s roar, split the
valley in two with her thunder. But she
only drifted, drifted and sighed, easy
as a leaf on the wind or an
Friday, September 22nd 2006 @ 4:37 AM
Posted by Anonymous:
(oops, cut me off!)

as a leaf on the wind or an echo

spending its breath. Stone-deaf to the echo
of her voice on his (like lovers looping
in a quick helix) he lay in easy
stupor hour on hour, drunk with love. To break
the spell would be to break his heart: Echo
grieved him while she loved, the love of him the

only thing they shared. She wasted with the
force of it: bone to ghost to air, echo
of an echo, thin and inchoate. She
left no absence in his cycle. Looping
days and nights of admiration, day-break
to sundown looping like orbits - easy

loops of constancy, until the looping
noosed him. And voiceless Echo could not break
him free: how to tell him, “Love’s not easy”?
Friday, September 22nd 2006 @ 4:38 AM
Posted by druken colin:
que deje de molestarme la señora ratera de profeco acapulco de chilpancingo y con hijas prostitutas en canadá y amante mecanico ratero de un millon de dolares de profeco acapulco
Friday, October 13th 2006 @ 7:16 PM
Posted by kelilah:
Today

the sun rises, and
the hot joy shining
lasts for a minute.
then a cloud puffs
itself up, too proud
for heat, and i
eat myself in grief.
the tornado of heat
and cold churns and
sucks, hugging me,
shrinking from me.

09/02/2005
Monday, October 16th 2006 @ 3:17 PM
Posted by julia:
has she…..god, i cant even type it………is she gone now?
i’m shoked, with tears..
Thursday, October 19th 2006 @ 6:11 PM
Posted by George:
I was eight I beleive. A simple sticky portuguese summer night. My body, I can see in my minds eye, entwined in my sheets, naked bar my white cotton underware; the kind my mum would buy in Marks and Spencers. Dragged from sleep to meet a dirty hand touching my forehead, stroking my hair. I cant quite remember my response, utter shock I know, panic I can imagine. I know I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, I could barley think. His voice was foreign, his face alien. Staring intently, hungrily. Kneeling beside my bead repeating the mantra glued to my memory, as if saying the rosary; ‘ets o key, ets o key, sshh’
When brain started ticking once more I ran through an eight year olds thoughts, could he be my father, no-too thin. Someone I reconise, no. Hmm, why was he here, did he want money ? Food? I didn’t understand.
My legs moved without command as I stummbled out of bead, my sheet held close against my chest.
Suddenly my memoery is quick sharp, no longer in slow motion lights flare doors slam, people run. Mother barges into the room, screams. Little girls jumps, screams. Mans taken what isnt his, scampers,breaking into a run.
I shivered to myself for the rest of the night, in my parents bed, his beer saliva still in my mouth, my head burning from his tough, my arms bruised from where he held me down.
I decided not to tell my parents exactly how he touched me.
I joked about it for years.
Im not laughing anymore.
He still follows me to bed, uninvited and sneers as silent tears escape my eyes.
Im not eight now, Im sixteen, so why, why did he only come back last year, why did it start to happen, I cant help but feel its because Im too fat, and too worthless
Monday, October 23rd 2006 @ 12:55 PM
Posted by Sanyu Kyeyune:
Hey, I’m new here.

The Princess
When making a human pyramid
You have to push down on a lot of heads
Before digging your knees into the
Man-shoulders of whoever was kneeling at the top.

And for this person, whose glory you’ve snatched away
The spotlight has risen above her head
To blind your heavily-mascara’d eyes
As your Barbie lips stretch far away from your teeth.

Just when it seems that the struggle has passed
When the spotlight has swept past the bottom row
Your muscles are tense from holding your pose
And you can’t recall if you shaved your thighs.

Then your mind meanders to scenes from your past
When you found Stacy’s bloomers in your boyfriend’s backseat
And you chastise yourself for losing focus
But half want to ruin the whole goddamn thing

And yell out “Fuck you!” to the crash test dummies
That have crawled from Suburbia to stare up your skirt
Or worse, rub your thigh-stubble against Stacy’s eye
Until she teeters and stumbles and everyone tumbles.
Thursday, November 16th 2006 @ 8:33 PM
Posted by Sandra:
Dear Marya,

Where can I read some of your poetry or short stories? I am dying to.
Sunday, November 19th 2006 @ 1:41 PM
Posted by Tatiana:
Okay. I wrote this about a month ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it means. Maybe one of you can help me figure it out??

absolutely f***ing nothing

i’m missing forever.
i’ll never achieve mortality.
i might as well

fade into the water,
let the leaves fall, watch as I
trickle on the rocks

and dry up
when the salt consumes me — because
my a-bomb still won’t detonate.

11/16/06
Saturday, December 16th 2006 @ 12:13 AM
Posted by Annie Kathleen:
Looks like no one’s really around anymore but… Here’s something, an excerpt from a longer poem called “Letters to Anne Sexton” that I just finished. Took me all freaking semester and and independent study with Delp but… Thanks to anyone who reads this.

XVII

On the car ride down to Maryland I sit snuggly in the middle of the back seat between Alex and his brother. I am reading those collected letters again that you wrote to Lowell and your dear Mr. Snodsy. Next to me, Alex is midway through Harrison’s Yesenin book. He points to number ten, a good one he says, about the time Jim shot that cow in the middle of the night and dreamed he was back in Ecuador (or was it Russia?) carrying a nameless naked girl on his shoulders. I know that Alex sees me there, unknowingly tickling the back of his neck as he wades, like Harrison, through the creek where we smoke some nights to take my mind off of dinner. This is why he likes this poem more than the others. Me, happy and sexy like an Aphrodite we saw carved out of porcelain in somebody’s living room and agreed was beautiful. I smile and we both go back to reading. Here you write to Snodgrass that you are never sane, but “pretended to be for your visit and THAT was kind.” I close the book and lay my head on Alex’s chest, let him brush the hair away from my eyes as I think of Aphrodite laying like an old cow, skin like curdled milk around familiar hips and thighs.
Wednesday, January 10th 2007 @ 4:42 PM
Posted by Denise Miller:
My mother is obsessed with saving time. To her, achieving a personal goal in the quickest possible fashion is always seen as better than having achieved the same goal over a longer period of time. By “personal goal” I mean any task one feels it necessary to perform; it could be as simple as going to the grocery store. When my mother goes to the grocery store, she’s armed with a teeny-tiny list (post-it note) composed of teeny-tiny abbreviations. “Sk” = skim milk. “Veg” = any and all vegetables she will need (which she has committed to memory because they are always the same exact ones each time). She has memorized the most convenient parking spot, which is the shortest distance from the most reliable shopping carts, which are ten paces from the entrance, which is nearest to….anyway, when my mother enters the grocery store, she’s a frigging bulldozer. Zipping up and down the aisles, so familiar with the territory that she barely needs to look at the items as she whisks them into her cart. My mother’s determined race through the grocery store has had some devastating effects on unsuspecting seniors, innocently browsing. They (foolishly) had not planned their grocery store experience ahead of time, and thus will be left floundering in my mother’s dust. Hit in the shoulder by a purse, bumped in the leg by a cart, fumbling with their canned corn. By the time they look up, she has vanished, leaving a vague imprint on their minds of something almost mythical: The Human Tornado of Efficiency.
Wednesday, January 24th 2007 @ 9:03 AM
Posted by lynn:
i feel it crawling in my skin
like I can create cell division
with the flick of my wrist
and the work of my hand.
it is not yet understood
that like the sparrow I am fed
the old and the child are dressed
I cannot make nations scatter and by me they’re not blessed.
but I am yet learning
(though futile I might seem)-
that I am like the wheat
and the chaff from me he’ll glean.
Friday, January 26th 2007 @ 8:15 PM
Posted by Dina:
Thank u so much for uve written Wasted. I’ve just read it and I already know that ur book is one of the most important book of my life. Sorry for my bad english, I’m brazilian. Besides, ur book’s name here is Dissipada. Yeah, I’m an anorexian too. Ure a tremenduos writer!
Monday, January 29th 2007 @ 12:27 PM
Posted by Jody:
Hey I’m in love and that is hard to understand.
Because this loves twists me up inside gradually
It bends me to my knees like lilies in a storm.
It bends my back into a question mark.
You can’t look into my eyes, I am in love.
Love burns a hole through your retinas.
It leaves you blind and angry on the floor.
Let your knees carry the weight of your heavy heart.
Let me twist and turn in this subtle wind.
Hold your tongue, don’t speak again.
There will be more where this came from.
Hey I’m in love, and that is hard to understand.
Monday, January 29th 2007 @ 1:31 PM
Posted by Tatiana:
Here is something I wrote awhile ago, based on a picture prompt in a LiveJournal community.

lily in cluttered pond

standing without a ripple, huddling
within the stillness,
her whiteness is captivating,
her torment magical.
tomorrow the spotting disease
will touch her, leave her wilting,
make her gasp for watered breath
while the air presses down and turns
her yellow darker, darkest,
liquid-nitrogen burned.

12/16/06
Thursday, February 1st 2007 @ 4:54 AM
Posted by Mike:
Denise, your story made me laugh, smile and wonder. The image of your mother terrorizing other unsuspecting shoppers is priceless. Im left imagining it as a hilarious cartoon. For some reason your mother is smiling and humming as she devestates the market in my visual. Either way, it was a good laugh. However, it also occured to me as I was reading your description of her that she certainly displays some characteristics that immediately strike me as unusually anxious. Seeing as the two girls involved in my life that had a variety of disorders between them also had mothers who clearly had and still have anxiety disorders. I know I may be jumping the gun here since you are really just describing someone who is terribly efficient and it doesn not necessarily follow that she is necessarily disordered. However, seeing as you are admittedly disordered than the possibility that she is seems reasonably higher. i hope that doesnt come across as offensive in anyway if im incorrect. i just figured that I should be honest about what i see.

Mike
Monday, February 5th 2007 @ 1:44 AM
Posted by denise miller:
The cute, clumsy counter girl with the questionable ethnicity…She writes poems on a kitty-kat notepad, pulls her knees up to her chest so she has something to lean against. She grips her pen tightly as the Dial-a-Ride van bounces and swerves. Too self-conscious to put on the seatbelt, yet unashamed of the fact that she’s writing fervently in a Subway visor and maroon, mustard-stained shirt. She remains unconcerned (if not slightly pleased) about the Sun City Resident (of the assisted-living variety) who is reading her poem from his seat (one back, one over to the right, he’s got a perfect view, and she writes big). She wonders what’s going on in his head, if he is in fact reading it. She realizes the possibility that her poetry could send a geriatric into cardiac arrest… Tilting the notepad downward, in the shadow of her forearm, she writes a big capitalized “FUCK” with a satisfying flourish — the van stops abruptly with a clatter (it messes up her “K”). The old man doesn’t know which building he’s supposed to go to, she fantasizes that his confusion is caused by her breathtaking beauty, but the truth is he never quite knows where he is supposed to be, and the girl thinks to herself, I know exactly what that feels like.
Saturday, February 17th 2007 @ 10:00 PM
Posted by Tatiana:
magical thinking

I drive in fetal position, blind
in the toespaces of brakes,
ativan under the tongue   their tang
makes gritty love in my cavities

I am spacious and
grasping at tree branches   buds
flap bark howls

I suckle my flesh, my blue nail
tasting the raw knuckle of thumb   night

dreams between my ribs

10/03/06
Sunday, February 18th 2007 @ 12:23 AM
Posted by holli:
I just want to say that I absolutely love “Out of Habit” by Say. I think it is so beautiful, simple, honest, and yet complex. In a word, wow. Please keep writing!!!!:):):):):)
Tuesday, April 17th 2007 @ 12:32 PM
Posted by cat:
Freedom:

A gull clips the air on a scalloped wing;
you hear its sharp falsetto and shrink,
startled, into tartan.

As I roll you down the pier, wheels shivering,
your eyes linger on the pinched arc skimming the breeze
like a fast-skipped pebble -

the sky turns on a wing-tip
and is brought to your lap.
Monday, July 30th 2007 @ 1:27 AM
Posted by Mike:
Sweet. You did post some of your writing, Cat. Glad to see it. Thats really good, btw. Looking forward to anymore that you feel like sharing.

:]
Tuesday, August 7th 2007 @ 1:24 PM
Posted by Em:
you tell me, get a grip, stop beings stupid and weak. but guess what?
you know NOTHING OF PAIN.
you might say you’ve been through shit in your
life. but it’s not the external things someone goes through that counts
because external things can be replaced.
it’s the internal pain that is real.

you tell me to shut up and stop complaining because
i get everything that i want and i have a great life
but you know what? someone can have a great life and still be full of
pain inside. and it’s not their fault and it’s not
something they can fucking control any more than they
can control cancer.

you have even told me that yeah, you actually did have
problems and you were depressed and all that, but
you ‘got over it’.

Then guess what? YOU WEREN’T TRULY DEPRESSED. your
life is so pathetically easy that you think that
whatever you felt was depression, that whatever you
felt was pain. guess what? it wasn’t. you don’t know
what pain is.

It’s like… someone who their entire life had been
beaten, who is always covered with bruises, who still
managed to stay standing through it all and one day is
hit too hard and falls. and then, someone who’s never
gotten a scratch in their entire life, who gets
pricked with a needle in the finger and thinks it’s
the worst thing ever.

And don’t you DARE tell me I’m weak. maybe i am
weak… in some ways, yes, i am weak. but overall? i’m
still alive. i’ve lived with this pain and i’ve lived
with worse and you don’t know SHIT about real pain,
you with your pathetic soft life. you don’t know pain
because you’ve never experienced pain. you’re WEAK.

But no, who do you say is weak? someone who resorts to an eating disorder? to
cutting? to suicide? sure, there are exceptions, but
in general? THOSE PEOPLE ARE STRONGER THAN YOU WILL
EVER BE , BECAUSE THEY HAVE EXPERIENCED AND WITHSTOOD
MORE PAIN THAN YOU HAVE EVER KNOWN!!
the ones you call weak? they are the strongest of all.

You, on the other
Monday, August 13th 2007 @ 7:51 PM
Posted by Em:
You, on the other hand?
you’re pathetic. you’re weak. and you dont know what pain is.
SO STOP JUDGING ME.
Monday, August 13th 2007 @ 10:02 PM
Posted by cat:
I just finished therapy…yay me. Wrote a poem to celebrate. Anyone have any thoughts? Too many metaphors? Any feedback appreciated! Thanks, as always X

You thwarted my seclusion in a private hell
of full-length glass, and fat, and toilet bowls,
and I accepted - even welcomed - the intrusion. You too had known the baying howls
of personal demons, but had paid your dues
in soggy gags of bread and wine and lived to tell
the tale. (The white-coats told you not to, squeaking like their rubber soles
on hospital linoleum, but you knew better and refused
to play dumb, choosing instead to exhume the clattering bones
of your skeletons. And they were like our skeletons,
bare and usual, and thus we were given a semblance of hope, a loan
of belief to cash when feeling delicate). And

the Tuesdays came and went, the leaves outside your window
browned, then budded, browned, then died
their wilted deaths again. I spent those months inside
my thoughts, gnawing myself like a caught fox, and your clever
questions never ceased their working at the locks - you wanted to know
about this, and this, and that… and gradually, over time, you pried
me open, skilful as a shucker sprising his lever
into the oyster’s muscled hinge. And out you thumbed
each bright, secreted pearl from previous gloom,
turning its new star in the working constellation
of your hands as the sun spoked in to the neutral room.
Tuesday, August 21st 2007 @ 3:14 PM

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