I built a nest,
Thinking timing is best.
I painted a version of you,
Thinking it was the best I could do.
I carved a version of you,
Thinking it would turn a new you.

Though I loved all of you,
I was hoping, I was coping,
I was sinking, I was scuttling.
I was drowning in my mess,
But I was surviving for your flesh.

I was empty, but I was watering.
I did everything for you —
But was I the best?
My life was falling apart,
But I was there at your best.
Yet I wasn't enough for your nest.

You wanted your best.
You wanted the newness.
You wanted it easier —
The kind that comes without test.

I thought love was enough to make you stay.
I thought I was the one you cared for.
I thought I was the one you ever wanted.
But I was the imbecile, you say —
The kind you see in cinema.

But I would say
I'm the kind you read in literature.
Sylvia Plath is my inspiration.
Cinema may fade,
But her words will never erase.
Cinema seems so real,
But what she and I felt is surreal.

By: Zaima

You let her send me away.
Packaged like a problem,
stamped and shipped to stone walls and strangers.
She smiled while sealing the box—
said I’d “thrive” there.

You nodded like a marionette.
String for a spine.
Silence for a mouth.

I was eleven.
She was already calling me a burden,
a shadow,
a stain on her perfect white tiles.
She called her children light.
She called me that girl
Like I was mould on the corners of your name.
You let her bleach the love out of you.
Now all you wear is her voice,
and it doesn’t fit right, Daddy.

You used to tuck me in with your rough hands,
tell me stories in a whisper only I could hear.
Now you only whisper to her,
when I walk in the room
And she slices me apart with those sugar-coated teeth.
She cuts me with compliments,
leaves me bleeding in apologies.
And still—
You nod.
You nod like a broken clock,
ticking to her every word.

Your house is full of sunshine now,
but it burns me.
Her kids gets smiles,
presents stacked like towers,
laughter as loud as fireworks.
I get a one-word text on my birthday.
Happy.

She breaks me, Daddy.
She breaks me with a voice that drips syrup
when she’s sweet to them
and acid when she speaks to me.
Her eyes scan me like a mess she forgot to clean.
And you—
You just stand there.
Are you made of wax now?

She hates me for breathing.
You hate me for reminding you I exist.
Boarding school is her win.
Her exile.

You said it was “for my future.”
But I know it’s because I didn’t fit her furniture.
Because I looked too much like your past.

And I swear—
Everytime I come home,
your love is like a museum exhibit.
Do not touch.
Do not ask.
Do not remember.
But I remember, Daddy.
I remember when I was the light in your eyes.
Before she turned them to mirrors.
That only reflects what she wants to see.

So go ahead.
Tuck her kids in.  
Call them angels.
Give her the keys to your spine.
Build your kingdom of pretty lies.
But know this—
One day, I’ll stop knocking.
I’ll stop writing.
I’ll become the ghost
You were too weak to hold on to.
And when I leave for good,
You won’t even notice the silence.

Daddy,
you let her **** me with words,
and you held the knife.

I push my fear behind my eyes
Further back than I can see
My dream has been eaten by lies
But I am no fig tree

I'm an orange watching my brethren
Ants chewing on their rotting skin
Their future, I was supposed to share in
Their peel, greenish of sin

I'm watching a rotting fig tree
That I know someone must've seen before
I mouth her, she mouths me
Is this all I'm waiting for?

My future may be determined
A rotting orange is all it may be
I thought it was self-determined
But I am no fig tree.

Don't know if I want to
drink this coffee or smash
the cup on my head.

Maybe it would look great
with coffee staining my face
like the pages from an old diary.

Maybe I am just a bunch of words
but you can't read all of them
because of the coffee staining
the pages and the words and my life.

The only thing that separates me
from Plath is that my words are
either written by a child or by someone
illiterate or by someone sad or by me.

What world do you speak of
That fetishizes the mother
And turns it’s back on the infant
Pursing
Suckling
Like a bee on a Carmellia in
July

What is inside of me that hasn’t
Already been emptied?
Do you every wonder,
Why, we mothers
Bake our children cookies
Only to wrap our heads in cloth?

And our husbands,
God rest their souls,
Will burn down the walls
To put out the fire

I stick my fingers in my throat
and throw up a basket of swallowed suns;
under it, my tongue is parched and pinned in place
like a dried house moth on an entomologist’s hand
that nurses it back to life

and demands devotion in return,
a poem in return.

But I have purged the feeling being out of me
like a cold, cold man now averse to the ways of his younger lover
who is alive for all of it — the lust and the starving kisses
and the quiet deaths in the morning only to haunt at night.

I leave letters for my bitten nails without meaning a single word,
and go to lie with the superficiality, the hypocrisy nesting under my tongue.

I have started writing poems again — see where they take me this time
and find myself here, once more
where a fool unpacks her baggage and out I come rolling
like a dead body with a foaming mouth, a brown moth burning under the sun,
a leech that scurries under salt and needles,
slowly eroding like sanity.

She thinks, therefore, she is, they say,
but at what cost? She looks on and pens this poem
with a tiny smile on her lips.

I am 3.5 steps behind you
You always said you had nine lives
Dear Sylvia, I wish you had stayed
For just one

Dear Sylvia, of all the ways to choose
You create poets who find no art in baking
Though I suppose our ovens
Are viewed a bit differently now

The brownies come out burnt
I write a poem about the time I
Thought about killing myself
but got distracted
reading Sylvia Plath

i feel like sylvia plath,
or james dean when he said
“live fast, die young, and
leave behind a beautiful corpse.”
except he didn’t say that.
but sylvia plath was volatile
to her mind
and a tortured soul.
the carbon monoxide
filled her soul,
just as the misery fills mine.
the burning desire to exit,
to end it.
the desire to burn the
fires inside my mind.
the poetic way of james dean,
and sylvia plath
lives in my veins
and feels like a raging fire
that cannot be tamed.