There is a lot of bad poetry in the world

"Don't be afraid of adding to it." Arin. Any pronouns. Main is @solreefs. I write prose and poetry and do my best to be okay.

[in-my-attic]

2023 Poetry

Mechanical Heart

Stones

Five Summers Ago

Future

other:

2021 poetry

2022 poetry

Personal Favorites

[in-my-attic]

they ask you what you want to do with your life, and you pick something you’re not really sure about, but it seems fine. you learn more about it, and it looks like an okay way to spend the rest of your life (because god only knows if you’ll ever retire, the way things are going now). it doesn’t make you happy, exactly, but it doesn’t fill you with dread, which is close enough.

but you have no idea how to get there, you’re on this path and you have no fucking clue what happens next. you’re making it up as you go along, and it’s working for the most part, but it is exhausting, all this uncertainty all the time. the truth is, you never had a plan, because you always believed you’d be dead before you got this far. and now you’re not, and that’s more than a little inconvenient, because you’ve got all this life left to live that you just assumed you wouldn’t get.

you think about the future while driving, and have to pull over, because suddenly the only thought in your head is how easy it would be to just let go of the wheel and go over the guardrail and hit a tree or six.

your psychiatrist checks in with you, as she does every month. any thoughts of hurting yourself or not wanting to be alive anymore? she asks and you shake your head like you do every time. it’s never quite been true, but you’re not going to actually kill yourself, probably, so what does it matter?

you tell everyone that things are going okay, because they are. there’s a person who sits next to you in one of your classes with turquoise hair who says hello to you every morning. you’ve been going on walks almost every day. your halloween costume is coming together. it’s just that none of it quite feels real, like you’ve overstayed your welcome on this earth, like you should have been gone years ago.

[in-my-attic]

You read the same five books five summers ago, over and over. Lockwood and Co. Teenage ghost-hunters in an alternate version of London. You revel in the descriptions of corpses, the horrific acts that tie the ghosts to the places where they died, the characters not too much older than you facing down these terrors that make your own fears of crossing the street a little less pressing.

You download an audiobook four summers ago, The Outsider by Stephen King. You listen to it while you sit in the basement and play with your siblings’ legos, and when you enthusiastically summarize the plot to your mother, she asks how books like that don’t scare you. You shrug and say, Well, they’re not real. Unlike when the carbon monoxide alarm went off in the middle of night, and you, an anxious insomniac even at that age, were the only one who heard it, and had to wake up everyone else so they wouldn’t die in their sleep. It turned out that the batteries needed to be replaced, but since then, you’ve lived with a deep, unshakeable fear that your inability to fall asleep is the only thing between your family and disaster. (Years later, a psychiatrist will offer to prescribe you sleep medication, and you refuse for months without explaining why.)

You take a creative writing class three summers ago, and put Mary Downing Hahn as one of your favorite authors on a google forms question. Her stories are shorter, less intense than the Stephen King you spent all last summer with, but that means you can read dozens of them in a row, soaking up stories of ghosts in many forms. You paint your nails and your eye catches on the bottle of nail polish remover on the shelf, and you wonder what would happen if you drank it, how quickly the acetone in it would kill you. You google it on your mother’s computer and the next day she asks you if you drank nail polish remover. You say no, and go back to reading, too afraid to paint your nails in case your control slips and you can’t stop yourself from drinking it. You lose yourself a haunted old church with a cemetery out back, somehow less scary than the thoughts in your own head.

You spend the night at your friend’s house two summers ago, and you two watch Fear Street in her living room. You watch the murders with ghoulish delight, hanging on every piece of information that might explain what’s going on. Someone’s head gets pushed through a bread slicer and you both gasp in disgust, but neither of you look away. You fall out of touch with that friend when you start school again, and you are afraid to look at her in the hallway, in case she is righteously furious with you for abandoning her, even though she has so many other friends unfamiliar to you, and neither of you really meant to cut things off, it just sort of happened- but still.

You’ve been listening to podcasts for a while by last summer, and you find yourself coming back to the same episode of The Magnus Archives, even months after you’ve finished it. It tells the story of a man who lived alone, hearing footsteps in the hallway and knocking on his bedroom door. He bought a sturdy lock and never answered the knocking, and that was that. Your house isn’t that old, but it creaks and settles in the night, and you listen, heart pounding, each time. But like the man, you never get up. You feared the sounds of your own house long before hearing this tale, and listening to it is oddly comforting. Someone else shares your fear. Once, though, you see a light on in the hallway through the gap under your bedroom door, and when it doesn’t go away, you hide under the blankets and don’t fall asleep for hours. The next day, the bathroom light is still on, and you pull back to shower curtain, expecting an intruder hiding there, but find nothing. Your father comes out of his own room. Oh, I left that light on again. Sorry.

You decide to learn to skateboard this summer, and you do it while listening to a survival horror story about underground cities and the beings who guard them. The White Vault. You fall and scrape your elbow, and it puts you in mind of the way the skin sloughed off the arm of a character who became a monster himself. Part of you envies him, terrible as that sounds. You lose track of time spent in front of the mirror, picking and pulling and peeling at your own skin. If only it would all just fall away. Holding scissors sends shivers down your spine, because while part of you knows they can’t cut through your skin, part of you is also tempted to try. Part of you wants to be a bare skeleton for reasons you can’t explain, and the other part of you is terrified of not being able to hold that desire in check.

[in-my-attic]

It’s like taking care of a puppy, sometimes. An irritating puppy that chews on the same thing every time.

Come on, I ask my brain, what have you got in your mouth? Spit the thought out. A sigh, a shake of the head.

Dying? Again? I told you, we don’t get stuck on that anymore.

Sometimes my brain spits it out easily, other times I wrestle with my brain for hours and get bitten for my trouble.

And each time it ends the same. There is nothing to be done except to pull the thought out of my brain’s teeth, throw it away, and keep going. Over and over and over again, no matter how tired I get.

[in-my-attic]

Secrets weigh me down like stones, stones I can sometimes pull from my pockets and share with strangers I’ll never see again. But I keep the stones hidden from those closest to me.

I had a rock collection when I was little; my grandparents loved to travel, and they’d bring me rocks with the names of the places they’d been to written in sharpie marker. Now I label my own rocks and I collect them in secret. I keep them not under my bed or on my shelf, but with me at all times. I can’t put them down.

It’s a dangerous game, hiding these rocks in my pockets or under my clothes or in my mouth. Some rocks I can hide so well no one suspects they are there. Some are obvious, but no one dares to point them out directly. If they are still technically hidden, they can still be ignored.

It’s risky, to be sure. But it is better than being found out. And I have tried to put these stones away, to throw them into the creek behind my house and let them sink, to find a nice box to keep them in, even to swallow them. And I have picked them up again, watched them float to the surface of the water, spilled them out of their box, vomited them back up again.

These stones are my secret burden. Some of them are beautiful in a certain light, but they can never be allowed to see that light. Some are jagged and cut into my skin, but these cuts can be silently bandaged. Some are so heavy I can barely carry them alone, but I have learned how.

I used to be able to swim. I haven’t touched deep water in years; I know I would be weighed down and sink like my stones.

[in-my-attic]

when i was a child, i looked at organ diagrams

and i was amazed to see the inner workings of the body all laid out for me.

but there was a part of me that did not quite believe that all of that could fit inside a person.

i wanted to open myself up and see proof.

now, i am told about something else that supposedly resides inside every person.

they talk of love

and i do not know what they mean.

they talk of what is inside the heart

and they cannot point to a single diagram

much less find it in my own body.

those organ diagrams presented the body as a complicated machine

and i wonder if that is all i really am.

if my lungs are a bellows, my brain a computer

my heart nothing more than a perfectly oiled collection of pistons and gears.

so

i kneel before the mirror, knife in hand, and i

cut open my chest and watch the gears and

motor oil

spill out.

[in-my-attic]

Sometimes, I want to disappear. To pack up my things and walk away, away from my neighborhood, my school, my life, and just keep walking. I want to wander, to run away from home so that the whole world can be my home.

I want to become a local legend of sorts, I want people to say, Oh, them. I don’t know where they went. But they left on purpose, I think. I want to vanish without a trace except for the people who remember me still, and I want them to think of me with a fond smile and say, I hope they found what they were looking for.

I want to disappear and leave everything far behind me, to move invisibly through crowds and always stay one step ahead of anyone who wants to find me.

[in-my-attic]

My mother would always ask me why.

Whenever I got in trouble as a kid, she would ask me why I did it, and I would tell her I don’t know. She’d tell me that wasn’t an answer and back and forth we’d go. I suppose that wasn’t entirely true; I knew why I poured all the soap down the sink or jumped on the couch for the hundredth time or hit my brother with a kickball, it was just that I didn’t know how to say it.

I read too much as a child. Ironic, how much I struggled with words, when I knew so many. I quoted lines from the books I read, slipping them into conversations to see how they fared off the page. But I could never come up with the right words of my own.

I started properly writing when I was seven, though I made up my own stories long before that. Writing, I found, was infinitely preferable to speaking aloud. Even in pen, mistakes could be crossed out and reworded, whereas once I spoke a sentence, I had no further control over it.

But even in writing, I am never quite satisfied. The words never quite look right, the sentences never flow the way I want them to, every turn of phrase gets a little off-track.

It is worse when it is something important, something I care about. I analyze every word, every individual letter, and it still always ends up wrong.

Look at me, spilling my guts and they come out all twisted, trying to bare my heart to you and instead just bleeding out on your rug. Always, always, that question. Why why why? And always, always, my reply. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.

I don’t know! I’m trying and trying and trying and it’s never good enough, not for me, and I am so afraid it won’t be good enough for you, so I just say I don’t know.

[willowcrowned]

this is your regular reminder that writing mediocre poetry is literally so important for your health

[in-my-attic]

There is a pressure inside of me, a pressure that’s been building up in my chest ever since I can remember.

I didn’t always notice it, but I think it’s always been there.

It pushes and pushes, and I push back, I can’t let it burst free. We are in a war, my chest against my common sense. I know letting this force explode out of me like it wants to would only be catastrophic, but a traitorous part of me wonders what it would be like not to feel the pain of always straining to keep this pressure pushed so deep down.

It’s a delicate balance, this secret war of mine, not unlike the balance that keeps stars fusing hydrogen into helium. Inner pressure, expanding outwards, against the outside pressure keeping everything together.

All stars will eventually explode or collapse, this I know. Something has to give.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. I know I have to.

The stress and strain are taking their toll; my body was not meant to contain a force so powerful, this I know. Something has to give.

Eventually, I will be faced with a choice: to collapse in on myself, grow smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter until there is nothing left of the pressure inside me, losing some of myself but keeping the rest intact, and saving what I love, or to explode outwards, freeing myself of the pain of keeping it all inside, but inflicting new pain, and burning and destroying what I love.

What I love would not love me if I even spoke of this pressure.

But I still love it, unconditionally.

Even when it makes the pressure so unbearable I can hardly breathe.

Something has to give.

[in-my-attic]

Really, it was not all that long ago that my life felt like I was falling down the side of a mountain, hitting rocks and trees and sharp edges, and sometimes bouncing off and flying through the air with no control over my direction.

These days, I am standing on the edge of a cliff.

I am not falling, not anymore. I am balanced, but it is a precarious sort of balance, like those rocks that science textbooks show to demonstrate potential energy. I haven’t fallen again, but the danger is there.

The rock is not a perfect analogy, though; how close I am to the edge depends on the day. Sometimes I am far enough away to enjoy the view, sometimes my toes are out over the cliff’s edge.

I don’t want to fall. I don’t want be on this cliff, I don’t even want the cliff to exist.

But it does, and so I am trying to build a railing along the edge, so that if I trip, I can catch myself. So far, my railing is flimsy; a piece of caution tape stretched between two sticks. Slowly, I am gathering what I need to make it stronger.

I don’t think I will ever leave this cliff, not really. And that used to scare me- often it still does- but I have learned that staying here is not the same as leaning out over the edge.

Someday, I will build a house here. A house with thick, sturdy walls, and a strong fence out back to prevent anything from falling off the cliff. Someday, the cliff will hold no fear for me, and I will look out of my house’s windows to watch the sun set just beyond the edge, and the only thought in my mind will be of how high up I am, how far I’ve come from the valley below.

[in-my-attic]

I tear open the packet, and the sharp scent of the alcohol wipes hits me like a truck. I remember being six years old, sitting on a stool in this very bathroom, as my mother cleaned my scraped knee after I fell off my bike for the umpteenth time. She told me it might sting, but it never did. In fact, I always liked the coolness of the wipe against my skin.

It feels good now, too, as I place it over the bloody spot on my arm, putting pressure on the wound like I learned from the first-aid section in the back of my second grade science textbook.

Still holding the wipe on my arm with one hand, I reach for a towel and dry my face, still damp from the shower. I am reminded, suddenly, of a joke I saw once, about saying you had a self-care day when all you really did was take a shower.

Self-care. What the hell does that even mean anymore?

I lift the wipe from my arm to see that the scab I scratched open for the fourth time in as many days has mostly stopped bleeding. I inspect my face, looking for similar spots, and dab at the handful I find. This time, it does sting. But only a little.

I fumble around in the cabinet beneath the sink, until I find the plastic container with the boxes of bandaids. I choose one big enough to cover the recently reopened scab and the spot next to it, and stick it on my arm. I find two smaller ones and put them on my left shoulder.

Another goes on my forehead, over the spot I always scratch at whenever I’m bored. Sometimes I think my face is simply a few patches of skin hidden among a hundred tiny wounds.

I can’t cover every place I pick at on my face, or I’d use up every bandaid in the container. Pushing my hair aside, I find a spot still crusted with dried blood, and stick an even smaller bandaid over it. That will have to do for now.

I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror once more, surveying my work. It looks good; enough bandaids to hopefully combat my mind’s crusade to destroy my skin, but not enough to raise concern.

I open the bathroom door, and as I turn off the light behind me, I find myself thinking about self-care again.

Sometimes taking care of myself is sleeping in, or making a nice breakfast, or painting my nails while I watch a movie, or any one of a number of much more aesthetically pleasing endeavors.

But more often than not, taking care of myself is simply showering and patching the holes in my skin.

[in-my-attic]

I don’t remember exactly where I first saw it.

It was a screenshot of some sort of challenge where you put coins in the hollows of your collarbones. It was being criticized in the context in which I saw it, but only the image stuck with me.

My hands went to my shoulders, probing, feeling, until they worked their way over to my collarbones. I felt them there, and then I looked in the mirror.

I couldn’t see them.

Over the next few days, wherever I went, I looked for people’s collarbones. As I saw them over and over so clearly on other people, I felt more and more ashamed of myself.

The fact was, as I saw it, that I simply wasn’t thin enough for mine to be visible.

Collarbones became an odd sort of benchmark for me in the years that followed. I didn’t find them particularly aesthetically pleasing on other people, but I was still somehow convinced that once I could see my collarbones, I would be happy with my body. Comfortable. Free.

Now, I stand before the mirror again. My collarbones still stay hidden, and the rest of my body is still quite far from the skeleton-like structure I so envied in the past. So much, then, remains the same.

But one thing has changed. I have made a choice.

I will cast aside my arbitrary standard of beauty, a standard I never found beautiful in the first place but still forced myself to conform to.

I will not destroy myself to see my bones.

[in-my-attic]

When I was eight, I read that the ancient Egyptians removed the brains of mummies, along with most other organs, but left the heart, because they believed memories, emotions, and knowledge were stored in the heart. Essentially, they believed the heart was the brain. 

It’s easy now to look back and say they were wrong, but to me that statement rings of hypocrisy. Look around- we’re surrounded by endless heart imagery. Still we associate the heart with love, when in reality, it merely pumps our blood, and has no bearing on our affections. We wear wedding rings on our left ring finger because of the mistaken belief there is a vein there that runs directly to the heart. There isn’t.

(I learned that when I was eight, as well. Perhaps I learned too young to be cynical about matters of the heart.)

Did you know that the amygdala is the emotional center of the brain? Perhaps Valentines’ chocolates should be shaped like amygdalas, rather than heart designs that aren’t even close to accurate. The amygdala gets an unjustified bad reputation. Type “amygdala” into a search bar, and not far down the suggestion list is the phrase “amygdala hijack”. We learn about how the amygdala is responsible for our fear and anger, but not how it is also the reason we feel joy and love.

The reason, I think, that we have not embraced the amygdala as a more accurate symbol of romance is that it is not purely responsible for love. It controls negative emotions as well as positive ones, as opposed to the idea of the heart we’ve created. Popular perception of the heart connects it with love and nothing else. This allows us to venerate love as the ideal human emotion, rather than forcing us to accept that it is just one of a plethora, and that no emotion makes us more or less human than any other.

People tend to take offense at this theory of mine. They call me heartless, or cold-hearted, or say I must have a heart of stone. But this misses the point. My heart has no effect on my opinions of love.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if they are right. If everyone else’s heart pumps more than mere blood. If maybe there is something wrong with mine, and that is why I do not feel as they do. If perhaps my heart is that of a mummy, shriveled and shrunken and dead. Crack open my chest and see; old, withered flesh swathed in layer upon layer of sticky, tangled cobwebs.

[in-my-attic]

I have always hated noise,

have always craved quiet and solitude.

And yet I can never bring myself to stay silent,

and can think of no worse fate

than to be ignored.

To be the center of attention is its own kind of awful, of course

and I have never claimed to want all eyes on me.

But it is worse, I think,

to not be seen at all.

[in-my-attic]

You look much more like our brother than you do like me,

and yet

we are the ones who act like twins.

I hear my own voice in every argument we have,

see my own smile when I make you laugh.

You never stop talking,

but get me started and neither will I.

We rant and ramble,

make strange noises,

can’t fall asleep,

get curious frowns when we try to explain our thoughts.

We understand each other,

I think,

in a way no one else does,

even if we don’t talk as much as we should.

We used to not get along,

(often we still don’t)

and people said it was because we were opposites.

But now I know we are far too alike.

[in-my-attic]

I once saw a movie where someone was turned into a statue, but when they were saved from whatever spell had held them like that, the stone cracked off them. It wasn’t that they had become stone entirely, it was that their essence, their body, their whole self, was covered by a stone facade.

I don’t remember anything else about the movie, except for the insidious wrongness of the statue-character. It was an image of them, a near-perfect replica, but the longer you looked, the more it became clear it wasn’t them.

Yesterday, someone called the two of us girls. “Girls, can you help me carry this?”

A simple enough request. We helped, of course we did, and I bit back what I really wanted to say.

That I knew for damn certain there was only one girl here.

The person who said that to us meant nothing by it, and she wasn’t even there when I awkwardly declared my pronouns on that first day.

But you were there that day, and so I wonder. I wonder if you see the statue of a girl, the image of me that’s just a little bit off, or if you see me beneath that layer of stone.