Non-Fiction

She will bite an aching neck and an arm that always reaches out and will hold a child when they need to be held and will grab that child when they need to be held back. When children hit their heads on a rock or a table or the thinly carpeted floor, she runs to them and holds ice to the pulsing bruise, and in the back side of your left cheek a bulge of your will burgeons. She is power, though she does not always know it. She is sparks and mirror neurons and a life force throbbing to reach the future.

But sometimes she forgets this. Sometimes she lies in bed, or wishes she were lying in bed, or wanders through the rooms of a dark house, a dark cave. Sometimes she pushes your fingers deep into rocky clay soil, so deep she cuts her finger on stone, and still the barb at the back of her chest is a barb, and still her mind is full of voices that conflict. Something pulls her elsewhere, and something holds her here, and she does not know which is the better choice, and so she stays.

Mothers have lost themselves in this space. Hands-on children. Hands in the sink. Hands in water turning red and then clear and then frothy. Mothers have brushed their children’s hair and seen themselves spiraling upwards, like the strands of a spider web, filaments floating and breaking in a breeze. A snail crawls across red bricks on the sidewalk, grit on grit. A blue egg cracks in the gutter. Where is she now?

Oh, mother. She won’t believe me. I see her caving in, like a carcass, so full of fear she’s already made herself dead. I see her eyeing the white cloth, the small sock, and the twisted clasp of the bra. She doesn’t believe me that the anger in her is part of being a mother. She doesn’t believe she will remain a mother just the same. She doesn’t believe that the eye-flash, hiccup, aching longing to be elsewhere, is the same with the hug so tight she feels her child’s bones.

Oh, mother. The time will come when the belly will glisten, the sky will open and the mud will seep to her ankles. The time will come when the den is empty and the nearly grown daughter will stand at her side. The time will come when the leaves crackle a message and she will let go of the things she needs to let go of, and her body will lighten so much she will fly.

But until then, lean close and listen. Hear the fervent scratch in my voice. In the center of that hardened fist, she has always known the answer. She has always made the choices she needed to make. She is not stupid. And when the next choice comes, she will gather herself—milk, bones, and bristle—and she will go.

I let a squirt of Purell cover my palms. I punch in the code to open the locked ward door and let myself in. 758219. An aide is loudly calling bingo numbers, competing with the din of the Boston Philharmonic on the television. Of the eleven people in the room, only one is even looking at her bingo card.

I find my mother in her room, in her bed, as usual. I take a moment to watch her sleep, practicing my deep breathing to match hers and prepare myself to be mindful. Being present in the moment, even if I have the power to do this only in small snippets, helps us both. When I wake her up, she is so excited to see me, clapping her hands in front of her face when she spies the jelly doughnut I brought for her.

I answer her questions about who I married, what I do for a living, where I live, and how many children I have. I check all her drawers and her walker basket for contraband: dishes, napkins, utensils, and other people’s greeting cards. I get her out of bed and we walk to the dining room, where I sneak the stolen items into the sink. We sit at a table and eat our donuts.

I am entering a writing contest, I tell her. “Oh, are you?”

“What should I write about?”

“Whatever you want to write about. What do you like to write about?” “I like to write humorous pieces, like Rana Balasubramanian.”

“I don’t think I know her.”

I brush the crumbs from her chest. “This is a contest sponsored by a group devoted to Connor G. Huang.”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“You do. When I read him in high school, we talked about his books.”
“I knew him in high school? I don’t remember.”

I put the dirty napkins in the doughnut bag and crumple it up. We sit quietly. “What do you do for a living?”

I tell her about my paying job, but add, “I’m trying to be a writer.” “Have I read your work?”

“Yes.”

“You must be good.”

“You have to say that; you’re my mother.”

Pain and confusion cross her face. “I must have been a terrible mother.” Her chin trembles. “Why didn’t my mother tell me I had children? I would have taken care of you if I’d known about you.”

“Mom, shhh, it’s OK. You were a wonderful mother. I’m here to take care of you because you were a wonderful mother.”

She’s shaking her head, muttering, “I don’t understand this. Why didn’t my mother tell me? How did this happen?”

I redirect. “Look at your fingernails. What a pretty color!” We spend a few moments admiring each other’s manicures, leaving the issue of motherhood in the immediate forgotten past.

I get up and go into the kitchen to throw away our garbage and get a wet paper towel to wash my mother’s hands. When I sit down, she is so excited to see me. “When did you get here?”

“Just now. I couldn’t wait to see you.” “What have you been up to?”

I tell her again about my work, about my family. I mention, again, that I’m entering a writing contest.

“What should I write about?”
“I can’t tell you.”

“What would you like to read about?” I think of her old reading habits, filled with mystery and suspense. “Life. This life.”

I pat her soft cool hands, squeezing the bony fingers gently. “That’s just what I’ll do.”

With her idea clasped in the depths of my mind, “Oh, mother.”, I think to myself taking in every breath that she does.

 

 

 

Jude Al-Mufti is a current junior in high school residing in New York and is interested in literature, STEM, art, & global affairs. She has been writing poetry for five years, as well as exploring the world of filmmaking and screenwriting.

My essay originally aimed to reflect the monotony and disconnection felt during COVID-19, particularly in the later stages of quarantine. During this time, while traditional structures like school dissolved into recorded lessons and solitary note-taking, it felt like life was becoming more routine and cyclical. And while humanity as a whole was more connected than ever through technology, I felt incredibly disconnected from the people I actually cared about. Interactions with my parents were distant and perfunctory. The virtual enjoyment of others’ lives via my phone became a more palatable escape than engaging in my own reality. The ever-present mental lethargy I experienced fascinated me. I had not previously understood it was possible to feel so profoundly empty.

 When I heavily revised the story in April, it was during spring break. Although quarantine had been over for over a year at that point, I felt the mental exhaustion, sense of purposelessness, and reliance on instant technological gratification roaring to the surface as soon as the stress and structure of school ended. While I hated the academic pressure, being without it made me listless and apathetic. It was a feeling that resonated with many of my classmates, inspiring me to dig this story up and polish it. I didn’t intend it to be a commentary on modern technology, but I did want to showcase my reliance on it for any sort of satisfaction. Despite the initial inspiration of the story being outdated, I thought the story could still reflect the lethargy, disconnection, and desire for purpose present in modern-day life. 

 

 641 HOURS: DAYBREAK

Your pillow has fallen to the ground.

Action: shuffle your feet around on the floor, to and fro, like a faulty metal detector, before your foot connects. Pillow acquired. It is sandwiched between your legs and levitated back onto the bed, beep beep beep, typical claw machine. There is now a dust bunny on the bed.

With bleary eyes, you can make out a dash of orange beyond the window. And it’s interesting, that orange, and you could get up now to examine it some more, like how poets would, in these hidden moments, except there is a pillow cool on your face, and a dust bunny on the bed you want to try and kick off, and time is slipping away, like quicksand in your hands, and maybe there’s something about the orange beyond the window—

1000 HOURS: MUD

Your eyes are sticky.

So is your mouth, for that matter. And your hair. You swore you showered the night before.

You reach for your phone. You look at the time and fail to compute. Your mind cycles through a barely rendered script until you’re almost on the brink of sleep once more—

The door opens. Your mother walks into the room, and she says something about going to work today, for the first time in a while, as long as she covers her face and sits far apart, and isn’t that exciting? You nod, you think, or make some sort of noise, so she leaves. You lay on the bed, sticking to the pillow. There is a wandering sock pressing against your hip. She comes back, sometime later, and tells you that breakfast is getting cold. She kisses you on the cheek. Her mouth smells like coffee.

The breakfast is cold when you reach it. The bread is dry in your mouth. You eat it slowly, a podcast crackling laughter in the background.

1200 HOURS: QUICKSAND

You are at your desk. There is work, in front of you, presumably. For the life of you, you’re not sure what that work is. There is a phone, and it is in your hands, and you are not sure how long it’s been there. You think you should get lunch soon. You think you should go outside and exercise.

There is a phone in front of you. Time drifts.

1300 HOURS: VENTURE

You put on a sweater and you keep your pajamas on and you wear sandals that are a little too big. It’s cold outside. There is a podcast crackling laughter in your ears. You feel your breath circle back like a whirlwind in your mouth as you make your order and hand in your coins and get coins back that smell like copper-blood until you wash your hands turning them pink and raw.

You’re back in the living room. You can’t find any salad in the fridge. Cooking anything feels like moving a mountain, at this moment. You grab a box of orange juice and hope it counts as a fruit and hope a fruit counts as a vegetable.

1500 HOURS: STATUS QUO

You are back on the bed. Food sits heavy in your stomach. There is a phone in front of you. Time drifts.

1700 HOURS: ESSAI

You make a list. Arrogant. Pretentious. Insecure. Annoying. Lazy.

The list is crumpled and tossed in the bin.

You pull up a star chart and write down adjectives. Imaginative, supportive, intuitive. Your mind is heavy. There is a headache pressing against your temple. You want to lie down on the bed.

You make another list. Nice. Smart. Funny?

This list, too, lands in the bin.

Somewhere, objectively, you are aware you are a Person. A Person who Does Things and Knows Themself. You look at the first list once more and then inside yourself.

How are you feeling? Okay. Pleasant. Fine?

That’s not quite right. You look harder. You find you truly are fine, except perhaps pleasant isn’t the right word. An unpleasant fine, then. You’re feeling scooped out, yes, that’s a good metaphor, and filled up with something. Oobleck.

For a moment, you almost miss the worry. The pressing anxiety and overwhelming irrationality and harsh static that at least made you move. Then you shake yourself. The worry hurt, you remember, and it’s jinxing it now to even almost miss it.

You flop down on the bed. You don’t usually have these thoughts at 5pm, but these days, there’s little to no difference between three in the morning and five in the afternoon.

Time passes.

1900 HOURS: SHARP

Mom returns and she doesn’t say much. She wants to watch a cooking show and you want to show her a movie-that’s-coming-out-on-streaming-only-because-the-animators-need-the-support and she tells you to not move and watch the fucking cooking show. You’re angry, and annoyed, but secretly, it’s the most alive you’ve felt in a long time.

2100 HOURS: MOVEMENT

You take a shower and moisturise your hair. It’s the most productive you’ve been all day.

2200 HOURS: RETURN

You try to Do Things again. You type two paragraphs of an essay. Your words sputter out like an old car wheezing its final few miles. You type but the words don’t start up again.

ZERO HOUR

There is a phone in your hands. A pillow is cool against your cheek and your nose. The dust bunnies are gone. Outside, a motorcycle screeches. Outside, the wind is whistling. If you try hard enough, you could make out a voice beyond the window. And you wonder if you could listen in, like you used to when you were a child, like the writers do sometimes, in these quiet private moments. But there is a phone in your hands, and your eyes are a moth drawn to the light, and the moment slips away, quicksand in your hands.

 

 

 

Davina Jou is a high school student in Taiwan. They enjoy playing DnD, listening to podcasts, and talking to their cactus. Their works can be found on pen-and-palette.com.

In my fishbowl town, there wasn’t much to do but play in the woods. As usual, my friends and I walked along the creek until it led into town. We saw a swing on our way back, and excitedly, we rang the doorbell.

The door burst open, rattling as it slammed against the side of the brick house. The overwhelming smell of cigarettes flooded my nose as the homeowner stepped into the doorway. The man wore a wife-beater soaked with sweat stains. My eyes followed from sunburnt shoulders to his thick fingers gripping his handgun. My friends and I stared down the barrel. His phone rang, and I looked at the rest of my friends’ jaws dangling open. We ran.

My calves felt like they would catch fire as I raced from his yard. We stumbled over leaves and tripped over branches as we bolted through the woods and back into town. My heart was a bass drum, thumping in my chest and through my ears. I couldn’t hear anything over my fear until the sirens sliced through the rhythm of my footsteps on the pavement and wailed through the air.

The police stopped us outside the grocery store, and soon, three more police cars arrived. The officers towered over us, questioning us with cold expressions and tough eyes. I squinted up at them through the bright August sunlight, trembling with fear. Though my friends and I stood shoulder to shoulder, I’d never felt so alone. We were too young for them to run our IDs: we didn’t have any. The officers took our names and parents’ phone numbers, —then left, leaving us on the curb. I called for a ride.

My sister drove me home, stoic and gripping the steering wheel like she unlocked my jail cell. She glanced at me at the stoplights, her eyes filled with worry and unspoken questions. Before she went to her room, she hugged me.

The police called my parents to explain the situation. When my parents asked about the gun, the officer uttered coldly, “He had a right to defend his property. He didn’t know if those people were criminals or not.”

“Those people? They’re kids,” my mother retorted.

“Ma’am–” the officer sighed, but no words left his mouth.

He echoed the man’s fears but sat silent for me. Fog clouded my brain, snatching away my ability to think.

My mother hung up the phone with the officer, stood up from the couch, and walked into the kitchen. As she wrapped her arms around me, she whispered, “Girl, you’re beautiful. Your skin, your hair, your nose, and your lips are perfect. Don’t ever forget it.”

But at twelve years old, my hair, nose, and lips all spelled danger. My skin was weaponized to justify someone’s brutality. Since that day, my reflection in the mirror changed, and my innocence vanished. I learned that being Black meant being hyper-aware of my existence. I stood in the center spotlight in a play I hadn’t auditioned for, and that truth suffocated me. The smell of violence was tattooed on my mind.

I laid in bed that night, curled up like a baby. I buried my face into the sheets, as I muffled my sobs, aching to be anywhere else. This town wasn’t safe. My mother told my father I cried because the police scared me. But I really cried because I didn’t understand how the police  couldn’t protect me, how my skin was a threat, or how anyone could survive in a world this cruel. I had never felt so visible.

 

 

 

Rainey Reese is a high school student from Chicago, Illinois, whose writing reflects the intricate experiences of Black youth in America. Drawing from personal encounters and the collective history of her community, Rainey captures the raw emotions and complex realities in “On Innocence and Black Youth” as an exploration of the loss of innocence. Her work has been previously published in Teen Ink Magazine, Write the World Review, and Blue Marble Review.

Mile 1
In fifth grade I concocted an in-depth plan to fake sickness and skip my grade-wide mile run, because I felt ashamed I couldn’t keep up with other kids. I look back at that now and smile a bit, one mile is just one third of my warm up. It mattered so much to me that I sobbed a devious confession to my Mom, “Eomma, my stomach hurts” or “Eomma, I feel light-headed”. She just shook her head, smiled and made me eat a banana. How I have grown, and how trivial my worries were! Today, I have laced my shoes extra tight and they feel like wings under my feet.

Mile one feels like“a sleepy summer Sunday and a sweet, untroubled mind.”

Mile 2
When I think about why and realize it was because I didn’t want to look weak in front of the boys, my smile sinks. Little perfectionist me had wanted an airtight persona. If I was the top of my class in ELA and math, how would it feel to be mediocre at best at running as everyone sprints ahead? I imagined them zooming past me, making that whoosh sound effect that they put in cartoons as they leave me in the dust. Embarrassing in bold red letters burned holes into my mind.

Research shows that girls in classes with high-achieving boys tend to set their academic goals lower and lack confidence in their abilities than girls at all-girls schools. Those same all-girls school students are also more apt to perform athletically. When I found that information, I immediately thought why my parents didn’t sign me up for an all-girls school, how could they withhold the benefits from me? It turns out I just needed a fat lesson on smashing patriarchal and heteronormative myths and I’d be fine. Mile two feels like fire, gets me riled up a bit and the anger builds.

Mile 3
I don’t think I ever learned how to fail and be okay with it. It’s still something I work on everyday. Self love needs comes first. Mile three feels reflective.

Mile 4
How can I love myself when I don’t trust myself? Mile four feels raw.

Mile 5
Here’s where I convince myself that I am a mess. You are a loser and nobody loves you. Your best friend secretly talks shit about you, that’s why she hasn’t responded in three hours. You don’t work hard in school or outside, so you will never achieve what you want. You keep on making mistake after mistake, please try harder next time. Your body could be a lot better, why is it so heavy to run with? Why do your inner thighs hit one another when you step? Why can’t your lungs keep up? Aren’t these shorts a bit too tight? What’s going on with your acne? You definitely run ugly. Mile five feels like a stubbed toe against the wall of reality.

Mile 6
Italy, 2017, we went to a small beach that was supposed to be the clearest along the coast. Our tour guide told us it was a bit strange because it was a stone beach instead of sand. It was indeed beautiful, so breathtaking that when I fall asleep six years later to the mediation sound of waves crashing, this beach is painted across my eyes. Painted there is ten-year-old me, dashing in and out of the water relentlessly. My feet became cut, bruised and bleeding but I was proud of my battle scars. Mile six feels like rocks.

Mile 7
Seven has always been my favorite number. Christian theology says there are seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, and wrath. Seven was the age when I started sewing, my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. In China, the stages of female life are denoted as multiples of seven, like age two times seven at puberty and seven times seven at menopause. My birth numbers are 02/05/07, the two plus five making the year ‘07. In Iran, a cat has seven lives.

I was seven when I learned that pulling your eyes back so they look like slits wasn’t such a funny joke. For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent my summers in L.A. swimming, sweating and eating sweets with my seven cousins. In ancient Egypt there were seven paths to heaven and seven halls of the underworld. Seven is the name of my favorite song by Jungkook, who is in a band of seven mates. Seven was the amount of mornings I couldn’t get out of bed because my heart felt too heavy. Mile seven feels like tip-toeing on a tightrope between love and hate or a line between sweets and sins.

Mile 8
So close yet so far. My mental strength comes out to play around this time. The ground is moving under me, and each step forward repeats again and again. I can control something when I know what’s coming next. I start converting my pain into fuel. Each movement is both powered by releasing tensions one step at a time. Mile eight feels the beginning of proud.

Mile 9
In my room, I had an empty wall. It was naked and I wanted to give it clothes. Since I could read, my Mom wrote notes to my brother and me for any occasion ever, or just for the hell of it. I dressed my wall in these notes, arranging and taping them spaced appropriately apart. I’ve hung over nine notes up there now. In different words on different papers they all say, “Hey baby! I’m here for you always”. Mile nine feels like it’s finally coming together, fully dressed for the occasion.

Mile 10
Mile ten feels hard.

Mile 11
I’m now in eleventh grade and I’ve signed up for my first marathon with my Dad. I can run over ten miles consistently. I started training seriously a year ago when I was tired of always being tired of my anxiety. There were a million problems going on, running through and around my brain.

Imagine a room full of little people talking, but you don’t know what they’re saying or how to help or make them listen or how to shut them up. I needed a way to turn it off, an escape. I found that when I’m sprinting the last mile, music on full blast, playing the song run BTS, all the little chatters float up and fade to dark. So everyday, I lace my shoes extra tight and call out to my mom, “Eomma, I’m headed to the gym.” I run and run and run and I can’t breathe and I’m flushed a hot burning red. But I am free. Mile eleven feels pretty nice, right?

 

 

 

Riley Young is a Filo-Chinese High School student based in San Francisco. Apart from creative writing, she likes to run long distance, work with kids, sew clothes and eat lots with her family. Mahal Kita!

 

 

 

SOURCES:

 

https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-bts-run-bts-english-translation-lyrics https://www.britannica.com/topic/number-symbolism/7 https://www.dictionary.com/e/religion/the-seven-deadly-sins/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/womens-issues/201909/what-is-the-one-overlooked-a dvantage-all-girls-schools#:~:text=Girls%20in%20same%2Dsex%20schools,a%20lot%20of%20 individual%20attention

1. You suck and you know it. You will watch Stuck in Love on your laptop that afternoon you were too sad to take a nap. You will fall in love with Lily Collins. You will tell yourself: I think I want to write in English…so people from all over the world will understand me. Haha. No. You will only want that because you wanna be cool.

2. You’re not cool. That’s why all the kids hate you. So you will spend your free time on one of the benches at the forest park, scribbling poems on your composition notebook. You love rhymes. So you will keep making rhymes even though the grammar is off. You will write sonnets about fall – even though you live in the Philippines, for heaven’s sake. You will pen haikus starring leaves. You will curate verses about shiny rocks and flowers kissed by bees. It’s funny how when you will most want to die, you will find life in almost everything.

3. You will dream of getting a poetry book published. You will browse international magazines and press on your three-year-old Samsung phone during Physics. You will think about the reading fee and count how much you’ll need to save each day to make 10 USD by the end of the year. You will walk your way home to school every day, bearing the heat of late afternoon and the worry that your parents might find out–news flash: they will find out. And then you will spend your savings on something stupid like a skater skirt.

4. The summer after your ninth grade, you will send two poems to an online magazine. You wrote them years ago but never dared to take them out of your diary. One day, for some reason you won’t remember when you’re writing a feature article about it, you’ll be brave enough to take that chance. You will write an email, attach the files, then hit send. They will get back to you six months later. Then, you will squeal at the acceptance email and run to your mother: I did it, Mommy! I freaking did it! Loooooook! You will be the happiest you’ve ever been since you were thirteen.

5. You will dream of bigger horizons. You will chase brighter skies. You will turn your trauma into masterpieces and think: Damn! Look at this fine piece of art! (Don’t worry, this one will be addressed in therapy.) You will send out emails in magazines with big names and fancy promises. Months later, they will reply with various arrangements of words to spell rejection. Your Submittable account will resemble a broken stoplight. You will start to believe you’ll never reach your destination. Maybe, you never even left home.

6. In spite of life happening—or maybe because of life happening—every now and then, you’ll be off your rockers and go into a submission spree. You will never get lucky.

7. Somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, your poem about self-harming will be featured in a mental health journal overseas. You will be paid for the very first time. You will buy some ice cream and think of your words printed somewhere in Saskatchewan. While the vanilla melts in your tongue, you will stare outside your windows and whisper: I think I can do this. I think I want this life.
8. You will apply for a writing scholarship offered by a professional poet. By some kind of miracle, you will get in. You will attend Zoom meetings every 7 in the morning in a state of utter disbelief. You will treat every session like a grand occasion. To be fair, it is a grand occasion.

9. You will keep on submitting to magazines hoping for acceptances. The answer will be no or static silence which is, you know, still no, just more brutal. Once, your mother will find you sulking in the darkness of your bedroom and even before she asks anything, you’ll say: Everyone rejected me. She will give you a hotdog on a stick and a cup of hot chocolate. You will ask her to turn the lights off when she leaves.

10. You will wake up one morning and decide to reject your rejections. You will stitch a book of prose and poems out of your failed submissions. You will remember what your kindergarten teacher used to say: you can either find treasures in the trash or make treasures out of it. You will spend the next three months over caffeinated, sleepless, and drunk in the dreams that keep you off the ledge.

11. You will tell yourself you deserve to be heard. You will convince your inner critic you are competent enough to stand on your own. You will think of the child you were and the empty shelves in the library she ran her fingers across and think: someone needs to hear these stories crowding my head. So, like the crazy girl you are, you will self-publish your chapbook. You will put it out online, but that won’t be enough so you will have it on paperback, too.

12. People will pay you for your book. You will pinch yourself so many times. No, you will not wake up. No, you do not want to.

13. You will write for online magazines, journals, blogs – you name it. You will still get rejected. But there will be days when an acceptance email sings its way into your inbox and the stings of the rejection slips go quiet just for a while. You will write truly, madly, deeply. For yourself. For your friends. For strangers. You will write to bury skeletons. You will write to perform exorcisms and resurrections. You will write to escape reality and also to face it. You will twist words into anything you want them to be. You will get paid for this sometimes. You will be able to take your mom out to dinners because of it. You will be tired. You will be sick. You will take your antidepressants and stare at an empty page for the next five months after your diagnosis. When your drive returns, it won’t be in downpours, but in drizzles. You will be thirsty. But you have a kinship with waters. Before you know it, you will be flooded again.

14. You will never stop writing. You will never stop submitting. You will never stop getting rejected no matter where you are in your career. You will be twenty with another collection. You will thank God. You will thank your mother for her genes. You will thank Rad Bradbury for saying that you only fail when you stop writing. You will thank every victory, every fall, every road that brought you here.

15. At twenty-one, you will become a staff writer of the online magazine where you began your journey. You will be working with your favorite author on projects. In fact, you will be mentored by several authors from all over the world and you will wonder why at thirteen, every Friday in that forest park, you ever thought you’d be alone.

16. You will host your first writing workshop for the the youth from different planes of the globe. You will announce your mentorship program. You will break down at 2AM in your hotel room and fall to your knees in gratitude. Again and again, you will thank your angels. Again and again, you will thank your stars. And again and again, you will pick up the pen and go back to a blank page where you began.

17. Hey you, little dreamer. Who loves language the way she wishes she would be loved. Who tears into novels during lectures, lists collocations in another notebook, and searches for the meaning of the words in the dictionary instead of relying on context clues. Who thinks of a thousand ways to say “I love you” and “I’m sad” without actually using those words–because then, what else is poetry for? To the girl who should be in therapy instead of at the forest park every freaking Friday. Who seeks the wisdom of classic writers rather than asking her mom to find her a creative writing teacher. Hey you—yes you—with scars on your wrists, stories under your tongue, and dreams by the tip of your fingers…you will make it. You will save yourself with the lifeline of your verses and you will do the same to others in the future. Just give it time. And yeah, kiddo, your peers don’t like you right now but one day, they will ask for your autograph. So go, just go home.

18. Go home and watch Stuck in Love.

 

 

 

Fransivan MacKenzie is a storyteller born and raised in the Philippines. She is the author of the books “Out of the Woods,” “Departures,” and “i remember that it hurt.” Her works also appeared in Transition Magazine, The Racket, Abandon Journal, CP Quarterly Review, and more literary journals all over the world. In 2023, she became a staff writer for Germ Magazine, the platform that provided her first international exposure. She founded the Fransivan Mackenzie Poetry Mentorship Program to promote literacy while breaking financial barriers.

I always read the news before school. It’s partially because this year in history we’re tested on our knowledge of current events. And partially because I didn’t download the New York Times app for nothing.
The Fantasyland of Miss Universe meets Current Events.

A scathing article mocking the hypocrisy of Miss Universe “empowering” women and attempting to become an event of feminism. It’s worth noting that Donald Trump owned the pageant for nearly nine years.
“And despite the insistence on internationalism, this pageant, like all pageants, is really a festival of uniformity. Virtually every participant is a tall, slim, young woman with long legs, long hair, long (false) eyelashes, perfect(ed) white teeth and precision-sculpted features — all poured into skintight, extremely revealing sequined dresses, atop vertiginous stilettos. The effect is more Rockettes than United Nations.”
I laughed when I read the author’s witty jabs, but they couldn’t mollify the sadness I felt for the rest of the day. We can make fun of the program all we want, but this media blitz sells.
Millions of people tune in to watch women strut around in fantastical costumes while the contestants answer questions about the Ukraine-Russian war. Millions of little girls are mesmerized by the women in revealing unitards, wishing for a transfusion of that confidence. That beauty. That impossible perfection.

In seventh grade I made the mistake of laughing too hard at one of my friends’ jokes. A girl sitting nearby looked at me curiously.
“You know Irena, I never realized this, but I think you have your dad’s nose.”

When my dad was five years old, he tried climbing on top of one of his kitchen cabinets, failed miserably, and fell and broke both his arms and the bridge of his nose. My sister and I used to compare him to Squidward.
I stared at that girl for a second. “That’s nice.”
When I got home from school, I looked at myself really closely in the mirror. She’s wrong. My nose is a little better than my dad’s. It’s not nice, but it’s not comparable to a botched surgery. What would she know; she has fat thighs. But trying to convince myself that my nose wasn’t as bad as my dad’s didn’t take away the sting. That night, I scrawled in my journal:
why would she say that why would she say that why would she say that why would she-

I can laugh at the story now, but I can’t deny that it was her “big nose” comment that propelled my list of insecurities. If I ever came across a genie, I told myself, I would fix me. I’d wish for a smaller waist, smaller thighs, a smaller nose, smaller arms, and at the same time a bigger butt, bigger boobs, bigger eyes. I’d wish for a sharper jawline and angled cheekbones, plump lips and long eyelashes. I’d wish to be pretty. All I wanted was to be pretty.

My older sister’s car jolted to a stop.

“What the fuck are you doing, you psycho, we’re on the highway!” “I know you’re not eating,”
It took me a second to regain my incredulous expression. “What are you even talking about?”
“You skip breakfast everyday, and everyday Melissa sees you at lunch and she says at most you eat an orange, plus at dinner– you barely eat half a serving of everything. I know you’re starving yourself, and I’m gonna tell Mom.”

“Melissa is such a liar, I eat pizza for lunch. And anyway, I always have dance after dinner, so I don’t eat as much but I finish my food after dance.”

“No you don’t- I know you don’t because I saw the food wrapped in the paper towel when I was taking out the garbage.”

“Why are you being so obsessive? I literally eat, ok? Stop being so weird.”

“Irena.” Sonia was almost crying now. “Listen to me. It’s not worth it. You could end up in a hospital. You could die. Please tell me you haven’t lost your period.”

“I haven’t. And I’m not starving myself, you’re so paranoid.”

I hadn’t had my period for five months. Only my journal with daily calorie logs knew the truth:

Monday: 1100 calories, Tuesday: 1500 calories, Wednesday: 865 calories, Thursday:
1305 calories, Friday: 623 calories, Saturday: 1610 calories, Sunday: 1081 calories

Sometimes I wonder what that pale, miserable version of me would think of me now.
She’d probably just say what she thought about herself.

I need bigger boobs, a bigger butt, way bigger eyes. My thighs are too big, my nose is too big, my arms are too big. My jawline should be sharper, my cheekbones more defined. My eyelashes should be longer and my lips need to be bigger. Then I would be pretty.

I know what everyone says.

Beauty is more than one’s external appearance! You need to learn to love yourself! Body Positivity! Don’t indulge in society’s fatphobia! Appreciate your body because it keeps you alive! Stop starving yourself, you’ll just make it worse! Stop! Stop.

But even today, trying to appreciate how I look without achieving societal expectations is harder than achieving societal expectations. It’s too hard. Not when every person I see on social media is perfect. Is pretty. Not when every female character of every TV show I’ve ever watched has been thin and beautiful. And pretty. Not when a woman’s value in this world is almost always reduced to her appearance. She has to be pretty.
But being pretty is impossible. Skinny in some places and curvy in others. Naturally straight hair, but constantly curled and in waves. Eurocentric features with a hint of ethnic genes to enhance them. That weight on the scale, below 115 pounds, never fluctuates. We have to wear makeup, but not so much that it’s noticeable. We have to be perfect little pets: smart enough to maintain a conversation, but not enough to be intimidating. We have to know enough to intelligently answer questions about global politics, yet we are encouraged, actually expected, to prance around in ridiculous costumes while leering eyes rank us. We have these unattainable, contradictory, extensive expectations.

And isn’t it sad that meeting those expectations is all I could want? It’s all any girl could want?

“Women are born with pain built in.”

I put down my spoon and stared at my computer screen. Kristin Scott Thomas’ intent face stared back.

“It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives- men don’t. They [Men] have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here inside, we have pain on a cycle for years and years and years and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes, the fucking menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world. And yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no one cares, but then you’re free, no longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.

Later that night I printed out her speech and added it to the collage on my wall above my bed.

So, maybe it’ll all get better when I’m 65, when I’m free of my period. Maybe then I’ll look in the mirror and think “I’m really pretty.” Hopefully by then I can just, I don’t know, be a person.

“So what’s happened in the news lately?” I raised my hand.

“Miss USA won the Miss Universe competition on Saturday. She had the dumbest costume.”

 

 

 

Irena Kang is sixteen years old, and lives in a small town in Massachusetts. She loves to read— is currently reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and her favorite book is The Bluest Eye. Her favorite author, as well as her biggest inspiration, is Virginia Woolf.