I spring awake at four a.m.
Inscitvely clutching my phone to check on this kid’s petition
“End the G.S.A.”
The stress eats away at my sleep schedule
As kids use one misunderstanding to take away my heart and soul
A club I have inputted so much of myself into
And funny enough “Vic” has three letters too
I can’t sleep without their 300 signatures popping up behind my eyelids
Comments being recited in the most repressed part of my insecurities
300 people who are against one of the clubs that saved me
Saved my friends
Saved so many people
But there’s no room for a gay presence in Johnson County
I spring awake at four a.m.
Visions of the kid who keeps his gun in his car spring into my head
My chest feels open already
Have already bled out every ounce of pride in me
What more harm can this kid do?
Don’t they understand that by killing my spirit
They’ve already made storage container for their bullets?
I spring awake at four a.m.
Because I do not let myself feel any other time
Must stay strong to show that I am bigger than their hatred
That I will go on
So I refuse to let myself accept that ever-consuming fear that grows in my stomach
It’s just indigestion
Just me being another overdramatic queer kid
Just everyday life that I must adjust to anyways
I haven’t let myself feel since the incident occurred
And the reactions poured in
Drowning any sense of safety I used to feel
I am choking on their unadulterated bigotry
Gasping for air amongst the abundance of hatred
And I’m not sure if I’ll ever breathe right again
I spring awake at 4 a.m.
Because I guess it’s the only time I feel safe anymore.
School is a warzone for people like me
And I can't hide in the crowd so easily
When it's 1v300
So I'm desperately trying to hide behind my poetry
I spring awake at 4 a.m.
Because I don't know if my coping is working.

I wonder if the handcuffs were hereditary
If we were fed through those chainlink umbilical cords
Cut free and raised in disguised prison wards
I think our birth certificates may have been the first warrants for our arrest.
“Prison” was never a ***** word growing up
It was tossed around in potato salads
Mixed into our cole slaws
And served to us like pecan pie
“Prison” was not a ***** word
It was just a place that family members ended up
A Motel 6 specifically designed for Randolphs
But then middle school started
I was told that prison was for bad people
I refused to believe that it was for bad people
That my family shared rooms with criminals
Talked with murderers and thieves over a metal dinner table
That they were bad people.
How are you supposed to feel when you’re told that your DNA is bad people?
What are the charges against my biology?
What crimes have my genetics committed against the court?
Why are their laws written down in my ancestors' blood?
I suppose prisons are for bad people
But I don’t think you’re a bad person.
I wish I could just believe you’re a bad person
Since you’ve missed every warrant for communication
Every request for appearance to the important dates of my life
And I still want to pardon you from all charges
Because you’re my big brother.
I don’t think you’re a bad person
It’s easier to think that the handcuffs were hereditary
Than to believe that you ended up here on your own accord
And I wish this was your first time
But this isn’t my first time crying your name into a cinderblock wall
Begging for the release of my bubba
You always laughed when I called you bubba
Said that I had a way with words yet I still couldn’t pronounce “big brother”
I wish we got to know each other better
We were separated through a cascade of different fathers and custody cases
Names inked into legal paper before I even knew how to write it myself
I haven’t talked to you in over a year now
The only recent photos I have of you were taken at a police station
But you only got arrested a month ago
I can’t excuse the other eleven
What’s your excuse from running from family?
From the only sibling, you have left?
These handcuffs are hereditary
And every time they rubbed against your wrists, mine burn
Every time they say your name in a court setting
I hear it slamming into the sides of my skull
Every time they shut the bars of your cell
I am barred from another part of my soul
And I wonder if my name even passes through your thoughts
Cause when we mourned for our lost sister together
You said it was us against the world
So what’s the reason why you never returned my calls?
You said we were the only family that we had left
But as children of parents who didn’t care for them
The word “family” didn’t exactly hold much importance
We spent decades masquerading ourselves in the backgrounds of other people’s family photos
Trying to pretend like we weren’t secondhand children
We weren’t lost souls
Yet when they recounted their old memories
We could never fit ourselves into their homes
I relied on you to keep out of trouble
And raise your kids better than Mom ever raised us
But my nieces and nephews are still shallowing down the word prison like it’s Tylenol
You said I was the only family you could trust
The way you’ve treated me and your kids show me what I should’ve known all along
Whereas I had a way with your words
You never understood their meaning
Preferred silent smiles and passive-aggressive grunts towards showing emotion
You don’t know what family means
And I wonder if you can even feel my pain
Yes, these handcuffs are hereditary
And I feel your felonies burn in my veins
Causing avalanches in despair to cover my brain
Because what you don’t realize is as the youngest sibling
I inherited everyone’s pain.
Even your's.

I wonder why I wish to speak to you again
Despite the fact that it felt like you never listened
You never listened.
I complained about it constantly
Wrote sonnets about your lack of focus on me
Hoping you needed hearing aids so I could blame something else
Instead of feeling unimportant
You claim differently though.
Said I built up a wall between us
And now I realize that we weren’t only not on the same page
But we were in completely different libraries
Searching two different encyclopedias
Trying to find a way to define our feelings
I wonder whose anxiety made you feel boxed in
Was it my obsessive need for structured plans that built you in
Or your neglection of problems at hand that made them pile up?
We made better construction partners than lovers
Although that doesn’t mean much
All the bridges we tried to build collapsed into our salty tears
The home we wanted to make sunk into its foundation
We should’ve stuck to classmates.
And I as to move on from another failed relationship
Building roads to a different city that needs to repair its infrastructure
I wonder if you even deserved the sonnets I wrote.

Today, I am falling.
I don’t know where I am going to land
Or how I started falling in the first place
But I can feel my heart smashing against the ground
Can feel rocks landing on my lungs
I think it was a landslide.
A storm of the false assumptions my brain makes
Forcing me off of my mountainous high
Some people say seasonal depression happens in the winter
I think mine occurs during the hotter times
When things stay still and dry
But that one rainstorm can cause an entire mountain to slide
Hands no longer moving on my school papers
No longer babbling to teachers who see me as one of the hundreds of faces
What do you do when you're only memorable cause of your tragic backstory?
How do I become something more than a tale of depression?
How do I stop falling?

Today, I realized that I can never seem to stop my fall
Try and grab on to the cliff or the rocks
But they all slide with me.
We fall down together
Fading under heaps of mud that ***** our visions of life
Becoming nothing more than another lost fossil.
Bones under so much pressure we become fuel for successful people.
Why can’t I be the successful person?

Today, I wondered if there’s even a point in trying to stop the fall
Every mountain I conquer collapses anyways.
Becomes heaps of rocks and rubble for colonists to make skyscrapers on
My methods of success are outdated
For even the biggest mountains have been conquered before
I am nothing more than an unidentifiable face
That will be lost to the world shortly after her demise
Only remembered for her tragic backstory and a too short life.
They say in your senior year you should feel on top of the world
But I have yet to climb to that overhyped sensation

Instead, I am falling.

On July 2nd, 2001
A baby is born in Heidelberg, Germany.
I was wrapped in a pink blanket laced with my first panic attack
As the ghosts of my ancestors finished giving me my first lessons
They told me tales of greatness
So I knew what I wouldn’t become
Bathed me in lies of happiness and comfort
While letting depression sneak its way into my first bottle
Cursing me the moment I took my first sip
As the nurses came to collect my fragile hope
And wipe away every smile that dripped off my face
I began my journey in a life that I wasn’t meant to make it out of.
The stars sent out prophecies of almost suicides and constellations that formed hospital bills instead of heroes
But my parents still pretended that they were given a healthy baby
It would have been the first in the family line
We kept diving in the same gene pool, though
And in the end, we all drowned in the hope that some of us would succeed.
On July 2nd, 2001
Another tragedy is born in the world
It’s name was _____
But in a desperate attempt to erase all connections to my birth
And undo the curses my ancestors disguised as presents
I just go by Vic now.

In this nearly empty trash can
I can see the hard work of a former student who wanted her club to feel loved
Thrown away and ripped apart just like our confidence.
In this nearly empty trash can
I can see the scars on a kid’s wrist
Torn open and ripped apart until all of their pride bleeds out of their skin
In this nearly empty trash can
I can see the suicides of my brothers, sisters, and siblings that don’t identify as either
Their memories tossed out and joked over as if their breath never breathed life into their former friends
In this nearly empty trash can
I can see another GSA meeting poster, ripped off the wall and tossed away
Because even our papers don’t get respect in these hallways

The thing about glass shoes is that they break far too easily
In order to wear them, you have to glide like an angel
Sing like a delicate hummingbird
And weigh as much as one of their feathers
Wearing glass slippers takes a lot of practice.
If you press a little too hard, your feet are engulfed by glass shards
It's the fine line between beauty and self-harm.
Glass slippers are meant to be worn by princesses.
They symbolize all your fairy-tale dreams coming true
If only they didn't break whenever I set my foot in them.
I do my best to make myself petite for my glass slippers
Using the old pieces to carve out my cheekbones and make my love handles disappear
Somedays I wonder if I've crossed that line between beauty and harm
But I'll do anything it takes to get that Cinderella waistline.
You know what they say,
"A dream is a wish your heart makes,"
I have to do what my heart says, right?