“i trashed these pieces because they felt like cutting my heart out and showing the world my raw, bleeding chest, empty and unbandaged. i didn’t have the resolve to stitch myself back up without once again drowning in gore. or in other words, i couldn’t edit them into coherent strings of words without losing myself in the emotion i wrote them with. so they stayed buried at the bottom of my poetry document, messy and loose and raw. until now!!!”

“Why I never submit ‘Perhaps’ piece anywhere: Well, I’m very hesitant to really talk about love. It feels so…twee. I do write about it alot, but I hide it behind metaphor or oblique language. However, this poem was written as I was coming to terms with caring for someone who was aromantic, so I really couldn't figure out a different way to talk about it.  It’s very on the nose. But at least it’s honest.

Why I never submit ‘In The Park’ anywhere: I have a total love/hate relationship with this poem. The truth is, I do really like that last stanza. It makes me feel suave. If someone said that to me, I’d blush so hard!  But I’m convinced other people will just laugh at it- we all know rhyming poetry isn't exactly “cool”. So I don't think I’ve ever sent this one out.”

“When I wrote "R Loses Her Key," I was primarily focused on songwriting and poetry and had not written prose in a long time. I struggled to come up with a name for my character, let alone something interesting for her to do. Thus, R was born and she stars in a story about losing her car key. This plot is not particularly engaging, but the R character has developed and subsequently gone on to do more interesting things. This is the seminal R story.

Truth? is a poem I wrote while thinking about my blowhard boyfriend (whom I care for very much). Sometimes subtlety is a virtue. I whispered that to him once but it fell on deaf ears. I don't like this poem because it's not particularly original or colorful, despite its symmetry.”

“You’re Not Her: It was a (secret) small shallow musing that I had for someone. It was all because she looked like someone I once dated and it was just truly the strangest thing. I was looking at this girl who looked exactly like my ex but she was so different at the same time, and I knew that being drawn to her at first for that reason was so shallow and they were feelings I didn’t like to highlight. Yet, I wrote this piece to air out my thoughts because I couldn’t help but look back at times that I remember with my ex even years later. Memories that are beginning to fade but I still feel under my skin like ink from a tattoo. It feels like a home I once lived in, but someone else lives there now and everything is different. 

College Town Musings: I used to be a poet that would revel in my own pretentiousness and it was..not cute. So I tried to still hold onto that fancy-schmancy persona while I began to grow out of it. As if to be like “Oh, hey! I can still write! Look at me!” It just never fit anywhere and that’s okay.”

”I wrote this piece over seven or eight years ago when I was a teenager starting out with writing original fiction. I never did anything with it, as I was a very depressed high schooler who didn't believe that anything I wrote had any value to it. I was one of those kids who had parents with a very specific view of what my future should be and disparaged any interest in the arts. In recent years, and now with a bit more control over my life, I've decided to dive into my passion for writing. I've also done a deep clean of all my storage drives and found this. I'm an adult now, with years and years of writing practice behind me, and reading this story made me cringe. I understand that I was a child when I wrote this, but I find the concept and the wording very...well, childish. I find the execution sloppy and a little too try-hard, all the markings of a kid trying to write in a way he found cool. I was going to delete it, but then I remembered your zine.  For all that I might find my younger self's efforts laughable, it was those efforts that kept me alive. I can cringe at my younger self all I want, but I wouldn't be where I am in my writing journey without this little story. So, instead of deleting it, I'm submitting it, and I can hope my teenage self finds some joy in that.”