Coy Pond

Pretending to believe the silly lies of your friend

So they don’t expose your more outrageous stories,

“Losing your voice” and putting down your thoughts

So that they can squint in the direction of your innermost,

Silent treatment was the choice

That determined your quiet.

You’d skip the lunch line and sneak

Bread past the guards, only to drop it off the bridge,

You’d watch the pond fish gnaw at your empty stomach

You’d spend your lunches running in loops

Avoiding eye contact, but most of all,

Avoiding the truth that lurked in their empty words.

You look in the mirror, not to find yourself

But a figment of your imagination,

Your lungs do not help you breathe

But manifest as ribs sticking out of your stomach

Hoping to be ripped out and devoured by your tendencies.

I’m tragic like the last breath before you drown,

I’m delusional like the mind that occupies itself,

I’m numb like a leg that is asleep,

I’m hungry like the fish

“Coy Pond” (double entendre) is a free-verse poem inspired by Carol Ann Duffys “In Mrs. Tilscher’s
Class”. Having no recognizable rhyme scheme; it has four stanzas with active degradation of lines per
stanza. This is done purposefully to emphasize the more powerful motifs of anorexia, depression, and
neglect insinuated in the last stanza, reinforced by repetition and simile. The poem progresses from a
past-tense second-person point of view to a present-tense second-person point of view, and finally a
present-tense first-person narrator. By using enjambement and punctuation, the poem adopts a unique
pace in which the word choice can flourish. The theme is accepting others' judgment as irrefutable truth.
Count down
22

Stuck in my head

Irrational thoughts spinning

Psyched to fight

The loops are winning

Controlling the need for control

It just seems impossible

If it wasn’t attached I’d lose it

13

Checking, counting, washing

My hands are raw, they’re bleeding

The voices are screaming

Your trigger fingers mine

11

Hours in the shower

Washing their hands off of my skin

Cult

Rituals and sins

Picking at the imperfections

Pick me, pick me

Do you like me?

Chiseling themselves on my mind

Fooled by feelings

Disrupting my easing

Exposed but never free

4

Disrupting is disabling

Anxiety is meant to be

Exaggeration or distortion, how am I to tell?

“Count down” is a first-person point of view, free-verse poem with a complex rhyme scheme that the
author employs to connect ideas and juxtapose metaphors that would otherwise go unnoticed. Each
coherent message is broken up by “magic numbers”. Those experiencing Magical Thinking OCD become
concerned with lucky or unlucky numbers, leading them to believe that occupying oneself with these
numbers might determine future outcomes. Having OCD is like being in an escape room. Every
compulsive behavior you complete, you become closer to an undisturbed state of mind, except that when
you perform this task, the importance of repeating that ritual correctly to gain that relief is heightened and
attached to increased distress. The countdown of 22, 13, 11, 7, and 4 represents the fight-or-flight
response to this ironic dilemma while referencing Macbeth and comparing this vicious cycle to an escape
room. The theme is being manipulated by a toxic external force within one's psyche.
Unraveling
Little did I know how meaningless my words were

Cut off, and reverberating off the walls

Voice became muffled

By the shock sinking to the bottom of my stomach

Cold from the neglect of my ignorance

I could feel the twinge of my eyes

The world becoming blurry

Moving again

Until I could no longer stand

The sting on my cheeks

And the way they betrayed me

Tinting my words pathetically

As the lump in my throat picked the vowels up and threw them out of my lips carelessly

We’ll never be in the same moment again

And there’s nothing we can do to relive it

The nods in my direction to acknowledge my existence

Bored because they know I won’t be there tomorrow

The names clinging to anything they could

Cards, posters, even shoes

A physical manifestation of the mark I leave behind

And the very real void impossible to fill with conventional expressions of affection

Greif unraveling

My dad told me that one day he’d walk me down the aisle

Waltz at the daddy-daughter dance

Teach me how to drive

Half-conjured dreams

Unfurfillable

The bleached hallways

The lingering of eyes on me

As if I only existed in mumblings behind my back

And the nothingness of their grins

Hungry to dig their teeth into the realness of myself

Except that this was supposed to be home

And I couldn’t cram myself into that box

That I escaped from only in the confines of my own mind

Then I was standing there

With walls abandoned and my person scattered on the floor

Irreparably detached from me

And the facade fell

Why did the Pledge of Allegiance leave me hyperventilating

Frozen to the words I once believed with my whole being

Every time I looked at a flag

I could feel the unearthed soil tickling my ankles

And myself wearing black every day

As if mourning the person I used to be

It was because of the unpacked suitcase on the floor

The full laundry basket in the corner

And the depression that haunted our auras when we cleaned out the closet

Trashed the notebooks we spent years collecting

Of our innermost thought

Incoherent but beautiful

And for the life, I once hated and couldn’t understand, I longed for

I wished I could be like you

And not have to deal with the vacant memory of my father

And hold onto the rosary and his medals

Instead of his hand

And the emptiness of our house

Erasing pictures and names from the living room

Never took away the loss in our hearts

And it finally caught up to us

The years of running but never hiding

The grief found us vulnerable

Because pretending to be another person

And losing yourself

Will always rush back

To be a person whose emotions are boxed up

Is to be a person trapped in a box

And will only grow around the cardboard

Until the seams burst

And you’re left unprotected

By letting the memory of my father mold and fray at the ends

I, in turn, was left behind

“Unraveling” is a ten-stanza, free-verse slam poem with no recognizable rhyme scheme or line pattern.
The poem is written in first-person narrative form, and structured surrounding the five stages of grief;
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The author employs rich visual and kinesthetic
imagery as well as metaphor to explore the theme of losing a loved one and yourself. These powerful and
thought-provoking motifs encourage the reader to more deeply consider to what extent their identity is
based on others.
 In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class

You could travel up the Blue Nile

with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.

The classroom glowed like a sweet shop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she’d left a good gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone’s nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed

from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared
at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.

A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,
as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

-Carol Ann Duffy

In line eleven Duffy alludes to Brady and Hindley, giving the poem historical context and shifting the
childlike lens to a dark reality; enriching the narrative. Ian Brandy and Myra Hindley carried out the
Moors murders, named because the bodies of two of the five victims were found in graves dug on
Saddleworth Moor, and a third was discovered on the Moor (an ecological landscape of open uncultivated
upland, typically covered with heather). During the period of July 1963 and October 1965, the married
couple killed all five and sexually assaulted at least four children aged between 10 and 17 in and around
Manchester, England. In line 12, stanza 2 the author portrays mistakes as something that can fade, but
unequivocally holds murder and molestation as unattainable standards for a “mistake”, and rather refers to
the country which had failed to either notice or control Brady and Hindley. “In Mrs. Tilschers Class” is a
free-verse third point-of-view poem with no recognizable rhyme scheme, holding a linear time frame.
Each of the first two stanzas has eight lines and the last pair has only seven, transitioning in pace, tone,
and format. During the first stanza ‘you’ are in geography, second, you are in English, third, you are
enjoying recess and during the last stanza, you’re dismissed from school. By encouraging the reader to
interact with childhood memories as a means of self-reflection, Duffy evokes the theme of abandoning
early years and entering youth.