Pocket Reliquaries - By: Jessica Matthews

I whisper secrets to the plushies on my bed,

their stitched smiles cradle every hush,

holding my confessions,

inside their cotton dreams.

My mind turns into a restless playground,

swaying in my sleep,

unraveling into stray threads,

weaving labyrinths behind my eyes.

Receipts and torn notes haunt my pockets,

soft reminders in my worn down seams,

I fold them into paper cranes,

that only flutter faintly —

but can never truly fly.

Bookmarks decay into vows abandoned,

my purpose flickers like a dying bulb,

moths circling my mind,

luring me down cobwebbed corridors,

where silence twines around my joints,

and refuses to let me slip away.

My kitchen chokes on its quiet dread,

the milk sours into elegies,

while the fridge continues its hum to me,

a low hymn drawing me to the dark.

I sigh —

don’t forget to thank the faucet;

for always crying when I don’t remember how.

Please give a detailed explanation about the meaning and main idea of this poem.

A vulnerable and surreal exploration of my personal experience with depression, emotional repression, loneliness, and the sacredness of my own coping mechanisms and the objects around me; but also the failure of those same coping mechanisms.

Please explain your writing and thought process regarding this poem.

My writing process is intuitive and emotionally driven; I begin with a feeling and translate it through objects around me, my memories, and surreal imagery that I can come up with. I use metaphors to explore my own experiences with mental health, grief, and dissociation, letting everyday items in my house become quiet vessels for my unspoken emotion. Poetry, for me, is a way to preserve and process what I can’t always articulate aloud to people, in a way that is consumable and beautiful for them.

Why did you choose to write this poem?

I wrote this poem as a way for me to process my emotional and creative stagnation, as well as to release the weight of my unspoken feelings I have been keeping in while going through a break-up. This poem is the result of feeling too much, but not feeling like I have a safe or willing listener to take these things in.

Do you have any tips or anything to share with the youth writers who may be reading this?

Let your poems be messy, unfinished, sacred. Let them carry what you can’t say out loud yet. Writing doesn’t have to save you all at once; sometimes it just needs to sit beside you, like the plushies in this poem and in my room.