Poetry

a girl's face with blurred blue over top and a background of blue waves

Imposter Syndrome

Away from home with imposter syndrome
Fading far from the plight of perfectionism
Taunted by the unexplored, not on any exec boards
Sometimes struggling to just get out of bed

My roommate wakes up and runs ten miles
While I have clothes heaped in piles
And a hundred unorganized files on my desktop
Too anxious to answer an email

In constant comparison and competition
I’m not motivated by grades or majors
Student governance or unpaid labor
But paranoid I need to fit in

girl crying and looking at her reflection

Ghazal for Silent Girls

What do you call it when you learn silence before you learn yourself?

constellations of the perseid family

Constellations

it starts with a star. 

interlocking tan curves on an orange background

good things — a list

good thing I know how to be alone
so many people don’t 

Clashing sides of blue and red with jagged white stars

A World Divided.

A house divided cannot stand; / I grew up in a house divided.

Branches of trees in the mist

Silence

It is an odd grief, missing something bound to return 

line of figures standing each one more solid than the one that came before

Interlaced Legacy

What is legacy? / What someone leaves behind; / Difficult to vocalize / it is often unseen, / Unheard, / or even unknown.

a person meeting in the middle of multiple colored circles

7 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman

I’m standing at the intersection of identity / Each piece of me yielding for another / But sometimes there’s a collision 

two figures in a forest

Lessons on Friendship

Stay here. Take a walk and watch / our steps fall into synchrony like an old dance / we used to know better than our own names.

red circles overlapping

To Mercury

I walk downstairs and you are not there.