Voyage YA by Uncharted

Content warning: Themes of death .Your dad woke from a ten-day coma. He was forty-seven and living in the in-between measurements of time. You were fourteen. He shared a room with four men at a nursing home that specialized in neuro diseases like Parkinson’s and MS. He had the latter. During the coma, the nursing […]

Content warning: Physical and verbal abuse of a teenager . Thursday Night or Friday Morning The night air hit me like a slap. I kept my hands in my coat pockets and ducked my chin to my chest. After crossing the grocery store parking lot, I headed up the main street, past the classy little […]

Erica’s in our spot, her gold hair shining in the sun. I drop my best friend Birdie’s hand and get ready to run. I’ve spent eighty-eight miserable days waiting for a glimpse of her. She won’t notice me until I’m past the newsstand. I’ll skid to a stop, slide my hands around her waist, and […]

Here’s what I have learned. The holes don’t go away, but something else moves in. You’ve been hollowed out, a cracked oak yanked wide open by unyielding, unforgiving hands, They don’t care what they break as they scoop out the most precious, spongy part of you and squeeze. As the footsteps fade, and the ache […]

I forgot how cold winter can be. The frigid air is a thousand tiny pinpricks on my face as I follow Caleb down the path between our houses. “Come on, Kiki,” he shouts at me over his shoulder. His breath is a thick white cloud against the night sky. “California hasn’t made you soft already, […]

Remember the times your dad poked fun at you by imitating that silly cartoon and asking if you wanted to be a boy. Remember the times you felt more connected to your boy stuffed animals and had more fun voicing toys that were boys. Remember the times you only wrote stories from the perspective of […]

I liked the way her hand danced with the wind. The air felt harsh blowing against my face in the backseat, but Osh made it seem like her and the wind were good friends. Her other hand rested low on the steering wheel. She was undeniably cool. I made a mental note to drive just […]

Maybe after all is said and done we’ll sit down, for a cup of tea and laugh and cry, about what could have been to talk about how in my moonless plight you would sometimes, loan me your star, for the night. . We trusted so firmly in the cloudless sky and moved, into paper […]

the world is on fire and my mother is planting tomatoes   we sit down to dinner—like a proper family my mother says, even though we are mismatched, even though my so-called brother is rarely proper; my step-dad turns on the tv news scoops up beans, meat, corn while catastrophes blare from across the room, […]

(red) On the outskirts of the city lies a sleepy town I’ve given everything to: first breaths, first birthdays, first broken bones. I can’t see everything from my bedroom window. Not the pair of tracks that snake through town like the skeletal remains of a serpent and its former lover, always running in perfect parallel, […]

Content warning: This poem contains discussions of risky behavior that could be upsetting for someone with a history of self-harm. . I tried skipping half the chapters in that book but I still couldn’t get through it and eventually you took out the bookmark and said, “You don’t have to do this, I’m making the […]

Jenn and I sat at the table in the corner and drank our punch. It was so, so bad. The punch, not the table. Our table was fine, I guess. We were far enough away from the dance floor to avoid getting bumped into, but we were close enough to get a good view of […]