by Rossana Segovia
“You’re going to hurt yourself, let me do it.”
My mother snatched the kitchen knife from my hand and pressed the vegetables gently against the wooden board, raising the knife edge to create thin, uniform cuts, forming perfect circles and cubes for the soup she had cooked but would present to the family as my original dish.
Read More »by Rowan Moskowitz
I have a little demon on my shoulder. Not the type who whispers in my ear encouraging me to do bad things to others like in a stereotypical cartoon setting, but more so one that whispers insults and lies to me. It’s my own personal bully, following me wherever I go and reminding me of all the things that could go wrong. Then? It tells me how I deserve it, claiming that I ruin everything and just bother people with my presence. It makes me feel as if I’m back in middle school sometimes, memories of childish insults being thrown my way all coming back in one quick swift like a gust of wind that’s never ending.
Read More »by Audrey T. Carroll
[Author’s note/content warning: As the title suggests, this piece does mention several kinds of trauma, including PTSD, childhood sexual abuse, medical trauma, etc. Nothing is graphic here, and these content warnings ended up becoming part of the piece itself.]
1. You pick up a glass baking dish fresh out of the oven with your bare hands. Your brain tells you it is too hot and should be released. You
Read More »by Sania
Deep in my notes app, hidden behind to-do lists and funny quotes my friends have said, lies a collection of thirty-seven orange poems.
Read More »by Julia Anderson
There’s nothing like a drought to make you apricate the miracle that is rain.Read More »
by Daisy Solace
It’s 2013. I’m 11, living in Saudi Arabia, and anticipating House of Hades’s release with bated breath, counting down the days. It’s all I talk about, my best friend is getting sick of me. I’m insufferable, and I like it. I haven’t been into Percy Jackson for very long — just about a month by this point, but it’s found its space in my head and settled there.
As a kid who had always felt ALONEALONEALONEalonealonealone, it’s nice to read about a boy who’d changed schools so much that he has no friends, except for the one whose job it is to protect him. It’s nice to read about a boy who knows the truth: that the best people have the rottenest luck. It’s nice to read about a boy who, despite this, fights. After rows upon rows of pleasant protagonists, there’s a certain level of solace (pun intended) in Percy Jackson. He’s not easy. He’s not agreeable. He’s angry, rowdy, and, as Percy would come to say in the musical, impertinent. As a fellow impertinent child, I’m delighted.
Read More »I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. …
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? …
And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. …
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
– Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (as found in the book Sister Outsider)
by L. A. Ballesteros Gentile
There’s so much in it—the word sometimes: nostalgia and yearning and tenderness and regret… And so simple, too, so obvious: two four-letter words past the stage of hyphenation that portmanteaus often travel in fright.
Read More »
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