I was thinking about the film The Substance, and how, despite her phenomenal performance, Demi Moore did not win the award, while her younger co-star, Margaret Qualley, did. Many of the comments online pointed out how the film’s message was being proven in real time — and that’s when the first lines came to me.

The visual came to me, along with the blended poetic–prose form, as a way to represent parts of me that have broken off, changed, and warped.

This poem is my unfiltered look at the cycle of binge eating and self loathing. It begins with immediate guilt, descends into the deep-seated hatred that follows, and ends with the exhausting performance of trying to fix yourself until you feel completely erased. It reflects the painful gap between who you are and who you feel pressured to be.

This poem explores the difficulty of articulating and explaining yourself to other people. It is about loneliness, identity, and the struggle to find a language that can accurately express your experiences and emotions. It was born from a lifetime of trying to forge friendships and connect with others in a way that felt authentically true to myself, while still maintaining the illusion that any one person can be understood or summed up with the right combination of words.

True to its title, this poem was inspired by a particularly horrible nightmare and the experience of coming back to consciousness from it. I wanted to capture the way nightmares can feel as though they are physically haunting your body, even after you’ve woken up to find none of it was real.

This poem explores the abstract and multifaceted feelings that accompany the discovery of self-identity and coming to terms with the many contradictions of the human experience.

A prose poem I wrote after a break-up and wanted to connect with my 'witchy’ side. It explores feelings of loneliness, spiraling madness and the negative side of being too independent.