Jillian Thomas

Jillian is a 19 year old poet from Pennsylvania, who is currently studying neuroscience at university. In her free time she rows, skis, reads, and watches a LOT of Jeopardy! 

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

blood tsunami

TW: disorders, emesis, suicidal ideation and action, depression, anxiety, and OCD

i don't remember what it feels like to
be drowning but i imagine it is a lot
like this: a lot like a poet breathing without inhibition--
without overthinking // without loving
for the very first time;
a lot like feeling the spaces
between your lungs and your
stomach slowly overtaken with
a body exacting revenge:
it was never supposed to be like this,
you were never supposed to plaster
fragile drying skin against salty air,
you are suffering embodied in a corpse
never meant to be resurrected &

it is not until
the bile is filling your nostrils
and coming back up your throat that
you notice it has already filled every crevice
of bursting blood vessels snaking through your nearly
dying body and you are trying in vain
to bail the water out--

& all you have are bitten down fingernails
and hands with holes in them and who
can save a drowning girl with hydrophobic hands and a
body depleted of lifeblood, of a girl misplaced in a woman’s
physique, cramming maturity into a baby face, until all they
can see is aging forced too soon.

so you wait until you are vomiting stomach acid,
crying acidic melancholy and burning your clothes
right off your feverish skin

you lower yourself onto the floor and let
your watered down grief
drip to the floor as you writhe and sob and
scream because in what world
should you be naked and turning septic,
your body staging an attack on your
viral//chronic depression,
a punishment for having a body
in the first place &

after you are wrung dry
of everything you have to give
you sit in your own rotting flesh,
slipping on your own organs as you
try to escape the apocalypse--

and your organs fold their way back into your body,
stretching the skin you tried to make uninhabitable, but
they are resilient and loyal and as the floor dries up, it
starts dripping
like tap water back into the place it
has already burned a hole in and
your bones prime themselves
for the third attack this week,
and you

have no choice but to fold
your broken hands over your gaping chest
and wait to overflow.

like a drug

TW: disorders, emesis, suicidal ideation and action, depression, anxiety, and OCD

i inhale sadness like a drug it
sticks to my nose and lips like crack cocaine like
something i can never get enough of something that
i will desperately doggedly search for until it fills my veins
in all the places where flesh and blood used to be

it is there in all its glory waiting in the wings
to hug my lungs so much they can’t breathe and
then neither can i and

sadness knows.
sadness has watched from behind my crying eyes as
i let people back in again and again and again
and sadness has watched me starve myself brittle and
sadness has watched me check over&over&over again and
it has watched me say the wrong thing
and sadness knows. it knows exactly how
to rest between my ribs and use them as a ladder to
climb its way through my arteries and all the way up
to my neurons &

he whispers that i should kill myself
he dares me to slit him out of my wrists and
taunts that he will come back stronger- sadness
is immune to charcoal and hospitals and air and
sadness knows that no one likes me (not even myself) and he
needs to tell me or else i might dare to stay alive

& i still search it out and that is my fault
but consider this: sadness leeches from my bloodstream and
fills it with something painstakingly fatal
but keeps me alive long enough
to torture me more so what happens when it all drains out? an endless
paradox without an answer leaves me at the mercy of myself so

i crumple because there is no joy or passion to take its place i
haven’t even planted the seeds i
have become so accustomed to maneuvering around the sadness that i
never found a replacement &
all i have is the starvation and the panic and the checking and the shame
[i have everything to be ashamed of, no matter what you say]
&
so i return to be scalded and broken and beat because
the sadism // masochism of cyclic suffering is far superior
then being empty- at least sadness makes me something
[makes me feel something, rather]
and sadness must be laced with methamphetamines because
there is no other explanation for why i keep coming back.

& i think i am losing weight simply from
the effort it takes to breathe through sadness
what a stupidly strong little man- overriding basic human functions
as a sick game- chemical imbalance is him playing tennis with his friends & he controls my
vocal cords and all of a sudden all i can talk about it how goddamn sad i am is this what he
wanted? attention? well, he could’ve fucking asked.

maybe a month ago i would praise god
that i could lose calories from keeping myself alive but
now i am dying and the murder weapon and the killer
are one and the same