Submissions by avery

They tell you to be yourself;
why would you want to be anybody else?
"You're beautiful and smart," they say
"You can be dark as night, and bright as day.”

"Easy for them," you think.
They don't know about the bleach you drank.
You try to be happy, and you try to smile,
but it's hard when they call you a worthless child.

You wonder if you'll ever find happiness,
or if this weight will ever leave your chest.
Will you die trying,
or will you start soaring and flying?

Go out with a bang like thunder,...

If committing crime was not a sin,
I would commit one so evil,
So sinister,
That I would never again be looked in the eyes by the one
I cherish most.
Oh, this deed is not criminal,
But I will be locked away,
Trapped in my own mind.
I would make him fall for me, slowly,
The way I did him.
Slow, intimate nights,
Nights where I can feel his very essence
Inside of me.
And then, I would break his sorry heart,
The same way he did mine,
If it were just.
But for now I'll watch him from afar,
Undressing him with my...

You’re lonely on a cold winter night,
Desperate to fill the black-hole in your chest.
You pace around your room for hours before finally opening the liquor cabinet.
“One drink can’t hurt,” you think, pouring a glass of vodka.
You quickly down it, loving the burn you feel in your throat.
“I can have another, just to take the edge off,” you mumble.
One more turned to two and two turned to three until you were so plastered that you couldn't even think straight.
This soon became a nightly ordeal, you couldn’t function without it.
It fueled the fire that had been...

i remember being seven years old, almost eight, and looking down at my busted knee and letting my eyes travel upwards
up and up they went until i noticed something off.
i was sitting at a desk, three others by mine to form a square. i looked down and to my left and then it hit me.
i was fat. my thighs were larger than everyone else’s, and so was my stomach.
i went home that day, determined to change myself. needless to say, it didn’t work. but did that make me ugly?

i remember being eleven years old and hearing the whispers.
“she’s so large”
“how did she...