Tag: suicide

Three Poems by Austin Petersen

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The Passenger

My teenage daughter tells me there are times
when she wishes she wasn’t here—

I try to hide my panic as she sits on her bed,
not looking at me,
fingers tracing the creases on her sleeve.

Before she can finish the sentence,
the rest is already in my throat—

I sit down and wrap my arm around her,
stinging tears already matching hers.

I want to say, me too, sometimes.
I want to say, it’s been with me
for years, this quiet passenger—
the wish not to die, but to just
not exist—
never have existed.

What can I say to fix her,
when I don’t even know how to fix myself?
Lump in my throat, I whisper
it’s all going to be ok,
that it’ll get better with time—
I choke on the words.

I tell her that I stay for her—
and I need her to stay for me—
she’s not a burden, she’s the tether
that keeps me here on the hard days.

She whispers she loves me too.
We hold each other for a long time,
sobbing.

We don’t fix each other,
but we stay.

*

Scratches and a Bent Shifter

My eight-year-old brother blazed around the house
on our new red and white Honda Z50R motorcycle,
revs climbing with each lap.
At the end of the gravel he turned too fast,
leaned too far—
tipped over and slid to a stop,
metal grinding on rock.

The engine sputtered out.

I stood frozen as Dad’s footsteps came fast behind me,
bracing for his shoulders to square,
for the sharp holler—
we’d just wrecked the new bike
he’d gotten us for Christmas.

Instead, I heard a soft voice:
“Does anything hurt?”
He knelt beside my brother,
freed his pinned leg and helped him to his feet.

I had to clear my throat:
“Dad, is the motorcycle broken?”
He glanced at the scratched tank and bent shifter, then at me—
“It’s just stuff. I can’t replace my kids.”

As the engine cooled, the ticking slowed—
so did my breathing.
My eyes left the bike,
still lying in the gravel,
to Dad brushing the dust from my brother’s jeans.

*

Letter from a Turkey

Mom lets me check the mail today.
I march through the crunchy leaves to the mailbox.
Among the junk and bills—
an envelope with grandma’s handwriting.
For me.

I run inside and shout for my little brother and sister—
“Come see my first letter!”
They crowd around me on the faded blue recliner
as I carefully open the flap.

Three pages unfold—
a collage of rubber stamps, hand-drawn pictures,
magazine cutouts and stickers,
her handwriting weaving between them all.

A turkey sticker next to the words “Do you ever feel like”
and BIG cut from a magazine twice.
Trevor giggles— “A big turkey!”

Mom taps a heart stamp with a bite missing,
“she forgot your birthday and feels terrible about it.”

I scowl at the piano stamp reminding me to practice,
then groan at the pun she built—
sticks and a honeybee:
“It sure wood bee great if you lived nearby.”

Then, at the bottom—
Two stick figures, grandma and grandpa,
arms stretched from edge to edge of the page,
blue ocean waves stamped underneath.

“We love you THIS MUCH.”

Lindy traces the waves with her fingers:
“It’s like the whole ocean.”

I fold it carefully,
tuck it in the envelope.

Thirty years later, I pull it out.
My own kids piled on me in the recliner—
little fingers tracing the ocean waves.
My daughter asks,
“Can we read it again?”

I tell her yes—
but if the house ever catches fire,
save grandma’s letter first.

*

Austin Petersen is a Missouri boy transplanted to Utah, where he lives with his wife and five daughters. He came to poetry late, convinced for years that anything he wrote would pale in comparison to his influences. When he finally admitted this to his oldest daughter, she called his bluff and bought him a book of prompts. They in fact do pale in comparison to his favorites, but here we are anyway. As an AI technology sales engineer by day, he is drawn to the analog of putting ideas to paper. His poems explore memory, fatherhood, and the stories that shape us—particularly the childhood moments we carry without knowing why. This is his first publication.

pr nightmare by Matthew Toth

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pr nightmare

each august i plan a sound bite for my dentist
because my mom taught his children 25 years
ago, the school where she discovered me
thanks to a free test from the faculty lounge.
we tend to diagnose most absence as
infinite— my first gender the ultrasound
misread. in between my suicide attempts,
we couldn’t speak to each other, so i took
to wandering the streets without sidewalks,
though it hailed once and she picked me up
before i had to ask. all that year in a mask,
i sat through group therapy in a park during
sunset three times a week, in those plastic
chairs that fold up into slim bags to be worn
on one’s back, passing the long second hours
whispering my lamentations into a lantern,
counting the dim stars of the altadena sky,
wishing only to ride home in silence and
wake up in the driveway of a different
house. i can’t remember what i said to him
when i was 16, resenting the project of
brushing my teeth, anything that reminded
me, i was alive, there was another fire to put out.

*

Matthew Toth (he/they) is a writer and editor from Pasadena, CA. As a student at Kenyon College, Matthew has worked with the Kenyon Review and Sunset Press, a student-run publisher of chapbooks. His poetry can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Magazine, Exposed Bone, and Vagabond City Lit.

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Harpsichords

Hollowed-out shoulderblade
of a musical pterodactyl,

strung with strings of gut.

The fingers touch
like blind twins in adjacent gestational sacs
learning the face of their captivity.

You, with your flight of ideas—
isn’t language, for you,
a ten-ton tungsten harpsichord?

Angelically ungainly, swung
absurdly through closing subway doors,

or propped beside your place at Starbucks
in the way of anybody
trying to get to the restroom,

or angled into a back seat
to block the rear view mirror
of anyone
who’s ever given you a ride….

how can they know how dear it is to you?

You’ve drawn its every gut string out yourself,
clenched teeth, blue pills, hours of hissing—

your navel still bleeds sometimes.

What do the doctors know of verbal labor,
of gulped-down decibels of childbirth?

Every so often,
you leap off a cliff
with harpsichords
taped to your flapping arms.

Metaphors, like the long bones, so hollow
gravity can whistle through them.

You were born a pterodactyl—
you, with your winged words.

These gut strings, heart strings, living
wires that electrocute you
feel alive to no one else.

This world is an observation unit,
and you’re on the hospital roof—

IV pole your prophet’s staff,
your gown of glory
open at the back.

*

Not To Exceed 5 Doses in 24 Hours

Shaking out a chewable pink pill for my daughter’s fever,
I thought again about the other girl
whose stepdad took her to the basement
and tied a rope around her neck and tied
the other end around a crossbeam.
He entered standing up, his hands behind his back.
She had to cling to him because she knew
if she let go she would fall and
hang herself. It turned him on, how she clung to him.
She was ten when it happened. She was fourteen
when I did her intake interview
on my Child and Adolescent Psych rotation.
She had emptied a childproof bottle of pills
over the hollow in herself
at the fairy tale stroke of midnight.
This was a yearly thing for her.
“One of these times,” she said, “I’ll get it right. These pills,
they’re supposed to kill
pain, aren’t they? One of these times they’ll kill
what they’re supposed to kill.”

*

Twin-Twin Transfusion

My brother redrew the lines on his palm
with an X-acto knife.
Shaved his right eyebrow, shaved
lightning zigzags into his buzzcut temples.
Pierced the nipples that would give
blood but not milk.
Headphones jackhammered the pavement
of his birth body
to reveal an underground city
where he was secretly a native.
I think about him sometimes, I wonder
about the underground scene.
We never hear from him.
He moved there at seventeen
tossing fifty Valium
into the tollbooth coin basket
as he gunned his body home.
He went to war with his birth.
I know how I must seem to you
with my side part and my three kids,
but I had a twin brother whose bunk
lay empty every couple months
while he slept with gravewrapped forearms
in the child and adolescent psych unit downtown.
Excuse my double knotted shoelaces
and my model-minority smile,
but my temples ache when I remember him.
My palm lines tingle and turn to ants
carrying all the sweetness out of my life.
I hold the dripping razor
to my eyebrow,
daring him to grip my wrist and guide it.

*

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and the poetry collection Things my Grandmother Said (Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

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Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.