Originally, this piece wasn't going to be a huge demonstration of my writing skills and creativity, but now, I believe it to be one of the pieces I am most proud of to share with the world. This piece helped me deal with emotions I had kept for a really long time. This piece deals with death, grieving and regret and I believe it to have many interpretations for any reader. The process for writing this had a lot of ups and downs. Multiple times I had considered scraping it because I couldn't come up with anything or I thought I couldn't deal with the emotions in the piece, but now, looking at the final piece gives me a massive feeling of pride for myself and my creative skills. It wasn't the easiest to write, but now feeling slightly more apathetic towards it, I can deal with my emotions in a more healthy way and can look back and feel content with the piece and how I worked through it.

My short collection of three poems seeks to display my musings about the world, creativity, poetry, memories, and the difference between dreams and reality. I find that poetry helps me to express myself in a pure way, uncut and uncensored. Even though I chose what I consider to be more light-hearted pieces for this submission, I also think that poetry helps us to work through darkness, whenever it touches our lives.

This piece is about the feeling of knowing that you will see a loved one again even though they have passed away. This came from a place in my heart from when I lost my grandma who I was extremely close with and what helped me to cope with it I thought about seeing her again when I pass.

Nonno is a poem about my experience with my grandfather who had Alzheimer's and eventually passed away. Nonno is what I called him, it is the Italian word for grandfather. I'm a young writer finding inspiration in my life events, whether they’re good or bad. The world’s beauty fuels a lot of my pieces, providing a backdrop for my thoughts on stuff like grief and personal issues. Through poetry, I am able to share emotions and memories, creating a connection between my experiences and the world around me.

Grief is such a multifaceted topic that everyone deals with in a different way. I wanted to create a piece that had a bit of an ambiguous ending, but still related grief to escapism. It is crucial that everyone acknowledges the various ways that people grieve, so that we grow to be more understanding and supportive of one another.

This piece depicts my experiences as a transgender person. I wanted to show how it was hard for me to find myself and the terrible things I did to myself because of my appearance. But I also wanted to show the beauty of being trans, the beauty of being able to see yourself grow every single day and to find people who support and love you. I use the idea of static because even though it's something you'll never be able to feel, I can imagine the exact sensation. A constant moving, like small sparks setting off every second, it doesn't exactly hurt but it's so uncomfortable that it needs to be gone. It needs to go away. That's how I felt for most of my life. I needed to rip off my skin, I needed to do something about it or else it would get worse. But once then I found out that I didn't have to be what other people told me to be, and I could just be myself. That's when the static would fade and when I could finally be happy.

What If, is about a person haunting all of your un-answered questions. Someone that you could never figure out, and wonder what would've happened if they never left? This poem is about all of the thoughts that have crossed my mind throughout the past year.

a song of the sea' is a selection of three poems that articulate my search for identity. Through 'THE VASTNESS OF SELF', 'WAITING IS A PLEASURE, I AM TOLD', and 'AND AS THE TIDE COMES IN AGAIN', I explore self-worth, the fear of the future, and my slippery understanding of love. Much of my self-contemplation came during long, quiet walks on the shores of beaches near me, and naturally the writing reflects the writer - hence the theme of ocean imagery. While it was at times confusing to try to speak of something I don’t fully know, I hope that the words and cadences of ‘a song of the sea’ might resonate with you, even a little bit, in the same way it did with me.

Even in destruction, there is beauty. This is what I had in mind when I was writing Superbloom, a flash fiction writing piece revolving around post-apocalypse survivors emerging from their shelters to find a beautiful world growing amidst the destruction of their old lives.

"Move on." Those are the words that everyone is thinking when I tell them the story of you. They would never outright say it because that would be cruel, especially when they know how much you still mean to me. I don't know why I feel the things I do or why I snag them like a pesky sweater. But I feel so deeply about the people I encounter and the experiences that I have that I have to write about them. I have to write about them in the loveliest manner I can think of so that they stay imprinted in my mind until the end of time. I write about things that hurt me so that my feelings have somewhere to go. When I tell people why I hurt, they can never truly understand what I'm saying because my spoken words will never convey how I feel the way I can when I write poems. The poems I have submitted are a lesson in walking out of the quicksand that is time. I am exhausted from living in the past and holding onto my dreams of people that are gone. May this submission be a symbol of growth and prosperity for myself and all that read it.

This song is an original I had written, recorded, and produced myself. This was one of the first originals that I have ever produced. As I began to experiment with different instruments, adding textures of electric guitar (both clean and distorted), acoustic guitar, bass, bells, drums, and vocal harmony, I hoped of creating a story that felt subtle, yet somewhat euphoric. I wanted to represent a story of a new love that began to emerge and blossom.

This piece is a short story that comments on society’s tendency to treat others who have experienced trauma as social outcasts. People who go through traumatic experiences are often maladjusted and therefore often misunderstood. People tend to fear that which they do not understand, resulting in little support for those who need it the most. I wrote this story to encourage my audience to have empathy for people who are struggling, especially if they are isolated due to their pain and trauma.

I find it easier to write fiction based off elements that I see in movies or shows, or that I hear in music. But that can very easily, resonate with people. This particular piece seems to become more honest as time goes on.

I came up with the first poem as I was laying in bed and I could see the full moon out my window and it always make me happy. To me the moon represents time passing because most days feel the same but when I see the moon out my window, I know a month has passed. The second poem shows time passing as more of a natural thing we can’t control. The seasons are always going to change and life is going to move on. The third poem is a more negative poem because sometimes the days all feel the same and you want time to speed up to just get to the good parts of life. I think a lot of people can relate to this poem, feeling like your in a never ending cycle. One thing in my life I have been trying to work on is being more appreciative of the small things in life, like the moon. Just little things that made me laugh or smile. Not everyday might be great or exciting or even remotely good but there is always one thing I can appreciate.

Dealing with emotions has always been a difficult process to me. For the longest time it felt like I had no positive outlet, and having to hold back challenging emotions without one manifested in two ways. Freeze was about my experiences with not being able to move, because I was too tired yet still felt guilty, or getting lost in and overthinking. I would often stay in a chair, or lay on the ground, just trying to process my emotions. When that eventually didn’t work, I got overwhelmed and overworked my brain. This led to my second piece, Burn. I would become incredibly panicked, gaining an abundance of energy. I would pace and overthink and become so overwhelmed I would scream while listening to songs in the shower. I’ve moved past these tendencies, but lots of others haven't. I wanted to write these to show how dangerous a cycle this way of releasing emotions is. Oftentimes people repress or try to push through their emotions without properly taking the time to deal with this. This is especially common in people who we raised as men. I am a trans woman in the midst of my transition, and the way I deal with my emotions have shifted. Through Freeze and Burn, I hope to show how negative emotions should not be kept inside. Instead we should search for positive ways to release our feelings, and not force ourselves to “hold it all together.”

I wrote the work in my classroom at school because the writing is about school so being in the classroom environment set up my creative mindset for the project. A prompt that inspired me to write this piece was what sets me apart from other people, what struggle do I struggle specifically with? Being in highschool I feel like the pressure to find out and choose who you are is very heavy such as classes to guide themselves in the right direction for college but i don't know.

I wrote this peice because I wanted to open up about my struggles as the oldest daughter in my family. I hoped to capture that in a way that was similar to a letter.

I wrote this piece based on the last line. I’d liked the concept of it for a while and I wanted to expand on it, to expand on not wanting to live anymore, and maybe even staying alive just out of the fear of death. It contains elements of my other pieces, so it’s kind of a combination of everything I’ve ever written. This piece is relevant to me even now because trauma stays with us for life, we can try to work through it as long as we want, but in some ways it will always be with us.

This piece was definitely different from what I usually do because it talks about a grand scheme, not something super close and personal. I guess that's why I wanted to submit this piece, but with it being more about the world around me and not me around the world, it still feels close to me and I like that.

I enjoy writing pieces that include metaphorical descriptions of complex emotions– alongside straightforward hardships, usually centered around family and general interpersonal relationships. This piece specifically conquers the feeling of people around you not giving you things that should be a given– like love, care, comfort, and general understanding. It’s compared to the feeling of dying because the narrator sees the continued lack of these things, despite pleading for them, as a form of murder.