Letter to a Younger Self, Age 18, by J. David |
I want to say something that will convince you this life is beautiful. I want you to stop wanting to die. At the end of the day there are more choices than continue; more choices than all these tethers, all these sad and lonely houses on your street. People filling each of the rooms, minding their business. I want to say something that will convince you these lives are beautiful. Then maybe you’d surrender the idea that only certain lives deserve to be lived. And when you’ve come to believe in temporary nouns— temporary joy, temporary love, temporary pain— it will, at last, be the time to write a poem about grace. |
J. David is a Ukrainian-American writer and laboratory geneticist from Cleveland, Ohio. Their debut chapbook Hibernation Highway was released in 2020 from Madhouse Press. They are a Baldwin House fellow and member of the Sad Kid's Superhero Collective as well as Editor-in-Chief for Flypaper Magazine and chief poetry critic for the Cleveland Review of Books; their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Salt Hill, Redivider, The Rumpus, Passages North, The Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and others.