Julia De Burgos, Tr. By Heather Rosario Sievert, From These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry By Latin American

boys in red lay  along the platform pillowed on backpacks legs in the sun or sprawled on benches drooping hands fanning pale knees tanning ruddy

like a blush across the face of four pm heat

Sue Zhao

“Death is woven in with the violets…”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

i want to be good. (i want you to fear me.) i want to do what's kind, and gentle, and right. (i want to rip it all to pieces with my teeth.) i want to make the world a better place. (i want to shove my suffering down the throat of the world and watch it choke.)

I was a gifted child. Until I wasn't. I was the golden girl. Until I couldn't burn anymore.

My parents expected me to build wings of gold and fly further than anyone could ever try. I don't blame them, having a child to raise is like sculpting a clay pot, you can shape it the way you like, paint it the colour you fancy. To raise a child is to play God. To raise a child is to be God.

But to be a child is to fall, to make mistakes, to fail. The thing about being too bright at an early age means you burn out by the time you're 16 and suddenly the world around you becomes more gray and terribly, terribly lonely. The fire is never warm enough, nothing is ever enough. And one day you find yourself begging to a godless sky, begging for a new spark.

I was a gifted child once. I was the golden girl. And one day, I burned out.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

When the people you are closest to, who may even know you more than you know yourself, call you fearless and strong when you start doubting yourself, it makes you realise that there is a whole part of yourself that only others see and believe in. And maybe you could start believing in that too.

we are that which is foreign; daisies which drift & dwell upon the air of elegance, delicately untouched by the vast twine of such sorrow, only ever shared but never held & never seen.

Zoë Lianne, "Erasure"

Mary Oliver, "Felicity"

Emily Bronte, "Wuthering Heights"

I fought so hard to remain unseen, merely a shadow on the wall that could go unnoticed when I fell over my own two feet and into words that dropped like pebbles.

And now I fight myself to be seen again, pulling myself in from currents that I found first instead of drowning myself in shadows.