Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
Ins and Outs (what I implore you to embrace and what I beg you to reject)
In
● abandoning excessive shame
● seeking warmth and tenderness anywhere you can
● dragging it out in the open and making yourself look at it
● finding salvation in the crooks of everything you love, everything that breathes life into you, everything that brings you the kind of warmth only the sun and passion can
● pulling back the skin, reaching under your ribs, revealing all the rotten, calcified, eaten away parts of you to the room in the hopes of being loved and embraced anyway
● the art of noticing
● letting it ruin you. letting it burn you, and maim you, and rot you from the inside out, but getting up and going on anyway, living despite it.
● figuring out the parts of yourself that are unkillable and coming to terms with their immortality
● a white knuckled grip on people who embrace every version of you
Out
● continuing habits that wring you of the light that was snuffed out somewhere along the way
● thinking fondly of people who spit on your grave before the eulogy was even finished
● being haunted by what could’ve been
● allowing other people’s perceptions of you to cripple you
● fooling yourself into believing that the mirage was water that was just out of reach
● worshipping the idea of people
● believing that it’s too late
● not listening to the whispers that will calcify into screams
● being apologetic about choices that woke you from your century long slumber
● setting yourself on fire to keep others warm
● begging until your knees bleed
● swallowing the emotions until they suffocate you
Author Biography: I’m 21 years old, I’m from Montana, and I’m a full time college student.