Letter from the Editor
Two months after my first ex breaks up with me, fourteen and feeling like the world is ending as I sob on my bathroom floor, I decide, fuck it, I have nowhere else to turn. I open the Instagram app on my phone and press “Create New Account.” I follow a few quote accounts on my personal and have debated creating one myself, a place to put my thoughts, if even one other person felt the same. Why not. Simple, easy. I choose the first name that pops into my head: quohtable, for quotes you would repeat aloud, ones that make you think, “Oh.”
The first picture I post features a Tumblr-style set of lyrics against a white background, a theme I’ll keep even into today, though I don’t know it yet. I’ve never heard the song, nor even know the quote comes from a song: “You were red. You liked me cause I was blue. You touched me and suddenly I was a lilac sky and you decided purple just wasn’t for you.” I alternate the Tumblr-style quotes with black and white movie stills, the simple, angsty subtitles indicative of the sadness I feel. In one, Megara from Hercules looks down into her lap and says to herself, “Sometimes, it’s better to be alone. Nobody can hurt you.”
But, on quohtable, I’m not alone. My first follow comes from thishappypage, Jess, who at the time has under 100 followers. (She has 133k now.) Next come other quote and positivity accounts, and we leave each other comments, little hearts. My account grows slowly, and with each new person, I feel more connected to what I post, who I become online. I begin signing into quotable multiple times a day, whenever I miss my ex, whenever I feel overwhelmed by the hopeless, inescapable heartbreak I seem to constantly feel. Over direct message, my followers tell me about their lives, and I tell them about mine, secrets no one in my real life knows.
“I feel sad all the time,” I say. “I don’t know how to talk about it. I can’t make it poetic. I’m just sad.” Though typing this doesn’t make it vanish, it becomes more understandable, less all-consuming. A simple, hidden catharsis. A place to put my thoughts.
I first see that I’ve hit 100 followers in my school’s bathroom, checking my phone between classes. I scream aloud, a huge smile overtaking my face. That 100 people care about the quotes I post and the emotions I feel seems incomprehensible, unbelievable. “Congrats!” Jess and others comment, and I screenshot my feed to preserve this sense of fullness. Seen, if only for a moment. Supported, if only from a distance.
Soon, with encouragement from other poets, I start posting my own writings, mainly small snippets I label “excerpts from a book I’ll never write” and “the things we don’t say.” In them, I fictionalize the apologies I wish my ex would send me and the love I wish someone would offer me. I ask, “How do we learn to let go of the past? How do we learn to live with the ghosts of all the people who’ve hurt us?”
I never find an answer. I write about myself in the third person instead, as if by distancing myself I can become someone else, and yet unwilling to stop circling around my heartbreak, to fully become someone else. “Most days she still felt like she was drowning,” I say. “But she would never tell him that.” I would tell no one; only quohtable, only the people I met through quohtable.
I gain more followers, many of them personal accounts, simply people who like my words. I love each one, and I recognize the names in my feed when they like posts, my heart filling with what I imagine resembles joy. I want the numbers to keep rising, my words to keep moving into the world. I repost quotes from others, tagging them with credit, and they do the same for me. Over time, my followers become theirs and theirs mine, a mixing, a community. I hit 1k, then 2k, then further, higher and wider.
Still, I tell no one in my daily life about quohtable. To even imagine saying it aloud seems a break of some unspoken code. It encompasses more of my time, and I think in quotes, words coming to me in classes that I jot into notebooks, distracted. I feel guilty for hiding myself, for quohtable is more myself than I am offline. Finally, eating calzones with my mother in a pizzeria near my home, imagining quohtable reaching 10k (it’s at 9.8k now, so close, a number that would’ve made me balk last year when I first started it), I tell her.
“Why?” she asks, the first time anyone has asked me this, on- or offline.
“Because I wanted to,” I say. This is the only explanation I have: simple, the one place I can write my thoughts and assume control.
She sends me a screenshot of my feed when I reach 10k, alongside a text reading, “Woohoo! Congrats!” Though she means to support me, I feel violated, somewhat embarrassed. I want her to see me as complex, intelligent, above the melodrama of a teen heartbreak, not merely “the sad girl.” I want to keep my secrets, my sadness, hidden.
“Please don’t mention quohtable again,” I text back.
I don’t tell anyone else, none of my close friends, none of the boys I date, not even my ex when we tentatively become friends again and he asks if I ever wrote about him. When someone I know from camp follows me, I block him and everyone else I know, heart beating wildly. I stop posting quotes about heartbreak and share poems about a more general sadness, independent of love entirely. Religion creeps into my writing, concepts of sin and martyrdom. I read only what I consider “good” poetry, lofty and old, distancing myself from what I call “melodramatic Tumblr bullshit.” My feed fills with lines from Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Vergil. I’m educating my followers, I think. Even then, it sounds arrogant, still too simplistic, somehow.
My account grows more slowly. I keep the style the same, black font against a white background, so it seems as though nothing has changed, but it has. Comments and likes drop, and I receive less messages. I lose the motivation to post, and I spend weeks not signing into quohtable once, thinking about it only sparsely. When I remember, I feel embarrassed, almost sick. I don’t need it anymore, I think. I debate deactivating it, but I can never force myself to press the “delete” button. Too much exists there, an archive, a diary, that I don’t want to lose.
“Are you okay?” Jess messages me early into the autumn, following a summer of almost no posts. “I haven’t heard much from you recently. I hope you’re doing well. Sending my love ❤️”
I start sobbing in my bathroom. I lied: despite everything, despite myself, I do need quohtable. I genuinely care about Jess, the others I’ve met, the account as a whole. Everything rushes back to me, all at once, the same overflowing, overwhelming emotion. Quohtable is real. I’m real, I’m here. That simple.
I begin posting again, poems from other accounts on Instagram, writers with smaller followings. Quohtable grows again, more rapidly, though the like and comment counts stay low. I rise to 50k and wish I could tell myself, almost three years ago now, what I would create. Still, though, the writings I post shy away from heartbreak and tend towards the longer side, full of imagery and alliteration. Dating someone else now, completely distant from any emotions I felt when my ex left, I’ve forgotten the melodrama.
Heartbreak poems sound cliche, I think. Too understated, too simple.
Many accounts I follow keep posting short “excerpts from a story I’ll never write,” my own and others. I cringe when I see them, wishing that, like me, others could tell “good” poetry from “bad.” I imagine starting a more “professional” community, a place to officially publish the writers I do love on Instagram. By now, I’ve had a few of my own poems published in small literary journals, mainly online. How hard can founding one really be? I think. If it flops, it flops. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe someone else cares about what I and other writers have to say.
I choose the name “Body Without Organs” after a philosopher I’ve never read. It feels lofty, complex, aimed at deeper human truths instead of mere, stupid heartbreak. Less than an hour after I launch the website, I post about it on quohtable, encouraging submissions.
To my surprise, over two dozen individual submissions come in the first two weeks alone, most multiple poems in one email. I curate the first issue alone, and I reject nearly every piece about heartbreak. In one set of feedback, I write, “Body Without Organs tends to prefer poems that expand and explore the ideas they contain, and for this reason longer poetry sits better with us than shorter poetry. We also receive a lot of submissions involving love and especially heartbreak, which makes a piece about heartbreak a tough sell.” In another, I write, “I love your writing style, and the only thing that prevented these poems from publication was their preoccupation with heartbreak. Body Without Organs gets a lot of submissions of heartbreak poetry, more than any other genre or topic. It isn’t my favorite subject anyway, and seeing so much of it has only exacerbated my opinions on it. These poems could do more.”
Thankfully, Body Without Organs grows beyond me. (I will admit, readily, that being an editor involves constant learning and developing what poetry means to you. I hope to not repeat these mistakes.) I post calls for prose and poetry editors, and I encourage my followers on quohtable to apply. Many do, and I feel grateful not only for the love that BWO receives but that quohtable receives, too. I vow to keep posting and engaging in this community more, thinking it ironic that I meant quohtable to sustain BWO and caused BWO to sustain quohtable.
Without my split decision to start this account, I think, without my melodrama, my embarrassing posts and pitfalls, I couldn’t do this.
Maheen, the new poetry editor, likes heartbreak poetry more than I do. She votes “yes” on poems I might have undervalued, and we begin to accept more pieces about heartbreak. I stop reading Dickinson and start reading modern poets, posting quotes from other literary journals I love, my feed filling with endless emotion about race, gender, illness, and even relationships. One night, unable to sleep and head spinning with thoughts, I scrawl onto a scrap piece of paper, “The worst subject for a poem is heartbreak. The only subject for a poem is heartbreak.” I hang it on my bulletin board, to remind myself.
When I first pitch this feature to Maheen and Marriah, I do it not because I love short poetry but because I want to challenge myself. Not all short poems are melodramatic Tumblr quotes, I think, and not all short poems are about heartbreak. I worry, though, that we’ll receive piles of angsty prose-poems, full of sadness and relationships ending. And we do get poems about heartbreak, but: they’re good. Even among the ones we choose not to publish, even among the ones that do use old images and feel cliche, they’re real. The lines house real pain, real emotion, real people, behind everything. What I once thought was mere, stupid heartbreak is a deeper human truth, perhaps the deeper human truth.
Almost exactly a year after I started quohtable, I wrote, “You pride yourself on being complex and having complex emotions, but sometimes things are simple, and that is not a bad thing.” I should’ve listened to myself. I should’ve let myself express, on- and offline, the heartbreak I felt. I should’ve owned quohtable, the place that was simple, the place that was home. The girl behind quohtable.
Though Fingertips spans genres and themes, it houses more poems about heartbreak than we’ve ever published before. In “My Short and Indifferent Reflection on You Leaving Me for No Bloody Reason.” by Nawaal K. (someone I met through quohtable before she ever submitted to BWO, someone whose writing and worldview I strongly appreciate), the main speaker recalls, “I shed my skin / I bite the apple / the universe rewinds / I bite the apple.” She chooses her fall, and when the universe around her rewinds, she chooses to relive it exactly the same way, embracing her mistakes, turning them into agency and growth instead of mistakes.
Lucia Liu, in discussing her story “Temporary,” says, “My advice is to place trust in yourself and your pen—don’t hesitate to voice your opinions through writing, no matter how controversial or ‘bad’ your words may appear to you… I believe we should feel free to pursue our own styles and topics in life and writing.”
I want to finally trust in myself, trust in my pen, trust in quohtable. In an interview with Jess for thishappypage (her account has grown large enough to start an interview series), I say, “The act of reforming thoughts that already exist, rewriting poems you’ve already written, rediscovering something you thought you already knew—it’s not only an element of a good life but the crux of it.” I’m glad I’m no longer the angsty fourteen-year-old girl I once was, but I’m also glad I was her. I’m glad I knew the power of heartbreak, moved beyond it, and rediscovered it anew. Somewhere inside, I’m still the same person who started quohtable. I still own all those emotions and experiences; I’m finally ready to own those emotions and experiences.
Before launching this feature, I thought about removing old posts, the melodramatic scenes with my ex and “things I’ll never say,” but I couldn’t force myself to press the “delete” button. I did say those things. I exist there, in an archive, a diary, a real form behind everything. I unblock everyone I know. I message various accounts and say, “Thank you.” No explanation, no need for explanation. Simple. I bite the apple. My heart fills with what I know is joy.
So pursue heartbreak in your writing, pursue simplicity, pursue every wild whim and inclination. Start an Instagram account because you want to. Start a literary journal because you can. Fill short poems with as much love, sadness, and life as you can. As Prisha Mehta says in her interview, short poems are “like sparks caught in time, fragments of pure thought and emotion.”
Quohtable is, too. I am, too. The writings and writers featured here are, too. I hope you recognize their humanity, feel their stories, repeat them aloud, and think, “Oh.”
Courtney Felle
Editor-In-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
Two months after my first ex breaks up with me, fourteen and feeling like the world is ending as I sob on my bathroom floor, I decide, fuck it, I have nowhere else to turn. I open the Instagram app on my phone and press “Create New Account.” I follow a few quote accounts on my personal and have debated creating one myself, a place to put my thoughts, if even one other person felt the same. Why not. Simple, easy. I choose the first name that pops into my head: quohtable, for quotes you would repeat aloud, ones that make you think, “Oh.”
The first picture I post features a Tumblr-style set of lyrics against a white background, a theme I’ll keep even into today, though I don’t know it yet. I’ve never heard the song, nor even know the quote comes from a song: “You were red. You liked me cause I was blue. You touched me and suddenly I was a lilac sky and you decided purple just wasn’t for you.” I alternate the Tumblr-style quotes with black and white movie stills, the simple, angsty subtitles indicative of the sadness I feel. In one, Megara from Hercules looks down into her lap and says to herself, “Sometimes, it’s better to be alone. Nobody can hurt you.”
But, on quohtable, I’m not alone. My first follow comes from thishappypage, Jess, who at the time has under 100 followers. (She has 133k now.) Next come other quote and positivity accounts, and we leave each other comments, little hearts. My account grows slowly, and with each new person, I feel more connected to what I post, who I become online. I begin signing into quotable multiple times a day, whenever I miss my ex, whenever I feel overwhelmed by the hopeless, inescapable heartbreak I seem to constantly feel. Over direct message, my followers tell me about their lives, and I tell them about mine, secrets no one in my real life knows.
“I feel sad all the time,” I say. “I don’t know how to talk about it. I can’t make it poetic. I’m just sad.” Though typing this doesn’t make it vanish, it becomes more understandable, less all-consuming. A simple, hidden catharsis. A place to put my thoughts.
I first see that I’ve hit 100 followers in my school’s bathroom, checking my phone between classes. I scream aloud, a huge smile overtaking my face. That 100 people care about the quotes I post and the emotions I feel seems incomprehensible, unbelievable. “Congrats!” Jess and others comment, and I screenshot my feed to preserve this sense of fullness. Seen, if only for a moment. Supported, if only from a distance.
Soon, with encouragement from other poets, I start posting my own writings, mainly small snippets I label “excerpts from a book I’ll never write” and “the things we don’t say.” In them, I fictionalize the apologies I wish my ex would send me and the love I wish someone would offer me. I ask, “How do we learn to let go of the past? How do we learn to live with the ghosts of all the people who’ve hurt us?”
I never find an answer. I write about myself in the third person instead, as if by distancing myself I can become someone else, and yet unwilling to stop circling around my heartbreak, to fully become someone else. “Most days she still felt like she was drowning,” I say. “But she would never tell him that.” I would tell no one; only quohtable, only the people I met through quohtable.
I gain more followers, many of them personal accounts, simply people who like my words. I love each one, and I recognize the names in my feed when they like posts, my heart filling with what I imagine resembles joy. I want the numbers to keep rising, my words to keep moving into the world. I repost quotes from others, tagging them with credit, and they do the same for me. Over time, my followers become theirs and theirs mine, a mixing, a community. I hit 1k, then 2k, then further, higher and wider.
Still, I tell no one in my daily life about quohtable. To even imagine saying it aloud seems a break of some unspoken code. It encompasses more of my time, and I think in quotes, words coming to me in classes that I jot into notebooks, distracted. I feel guilty for hiding myself, for quohtable is more myself than I am offline. Finally, eating calzones with my mother in a pizzeria near my home, imagining quohtable reaching 10k (it’s at 9.8k now, so close, a number that would’ve made me balk last year when I first started it), I tell her.
“Why?” she asks, the first time anyone has asked me this, on- or offline.
“Because I wanted to,” I say. This is the only explanation I have: simple, the one place I can write my thoughts and assume control.
She sends me a screenshot of my feed when I reach 10k, alongside a text reading, “Woohoo! Congrats!” Though she means to support me, I feel violated, somewhat embarrassed. I want her to see me as complex, intelligent, above the melodrama of a teen heartbreak, not merely “the sad girl.” I want to keep my secrets, my sadness, hidden.
“Please don’t mention quohtable again,” I text back.
I don’t tell anyone else, none of my close friends, none of the boys I date, not even my ex when we tentatively become friends again and he asks if I ever wrote about him. When someone I know from camp follows me, I block him and everyone else I know, heart beating wildly. I stop posting quotes about heartbreak and share poems about a more general sadness, independent of love entirely. Religion creeps into my writing, concepts of sin and martyrdom. I read only what I consider “good” poetry, lofty and old, distancing myself from what I call “melodramatic Tumblr bullshit.” My feed fills with lines from Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Vergil. I’m educating my followers, I think. Even then, it sounds arrogant, still too simplistic, somehow.
My account grows more slowly. I keep the style the same, black font against a white background, so it seems as though nothing has changed, but it has. Comments and likes drop, and I receive less messages. I lose the motivation to post, and I spend weeks not signing into quohtable once, thinking about it only sparsely. When I remember, I feel embarrassed, almost sick. I don’t need it anymore, I think. I debate deactivating it, but I can never force myself to press the “delete” button. Too much exists there, an archive, a diary, that I don’t want to lose.
“Are you okay?” Jess messages me early into the autumn, following a summer of almost no posts. “I haven’t heard much from you recently. I hope you’re doing well. Sending my love ❤️”
I start sobbing in my bathroom. I lied: despite everything, despite myself, I do need quohtable. I genuinely care about Jess, the others I’ve met, the account as a whole. Everything rushes back to me, all at once, the same overflowing, overwhelming emotion. Quohtable is real. I’m real, I’m here. That simple.
I begin posting again, poems from other accounts on Instagram, writers with smaller followings. Quohtable grows again, more rapidly, though the like and comment counts stay low. I rise to 50k and wish I could tell myself, almost three years ago now, what I would create. Still, though, the writings I post shy away from heartbreak and tend towards the longer side, full of imagery and alliteration. Dating someone else now, completely distant from any emotions I felt when my ex left, I’ve forgotten the melodrama.
Heartbreak poems sound cliche, I think. Too understated, too simple.
Many accounts I follow keep posting short “excerpts from a story I’ll never write,” my own and others. I cringe when I see them, wishing that, like me, others could tell “good” poetry from “bad.” I imagine starting a more “professional” community, a place to officially publish the writers I do love on Instagram. By now, I’ve had a few of my own poems published in small literary journals, mainly online. How hard can founding one really be? I think. If it flops, it flops. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe someone else cares about what I and other writers have to say.
I choose the name “Body Without Organs” after a philosopher I’ve never read. It feels lofty, complex, aimed at deeper human truths instead of mere, stupid heartbreak. Less than an hour after I launch the website, I post about it on quohtable, encouraging submissions.
To my surprise, over two dozen individual submissions come in the first two weeks alone, most multiple poems in one email. I curate the first issue alone, and I reject nearly every piece about heartbreak. In one set of feedback, I write, “Body Without Organs tends to prefer poems that expand and explore the ideas they contain, and for this reason longer poetry sits better with us than shorter poetry. We also receive a lot of submissions involving love and especially heartbreak, which makes a piece about heartbreak a tough sell.” In another, I write, “I love your writing style, and the only thing that prevented these poems from publication was their preoccupation with heartbreak. Body Without Organs gets a lot of submissions of heartbreak poetry, more than any other genre or topic. It isn’t my favorite subject anyway, and seeing so much of it has only exacerbated my opinions on it. These poems could do more.”
Thankfully, Body Without Organs grows beyond me. (I will admit, readily, that being an editor involves constant learning and developing what poetry means to you. I hope to not repeat these mistakes.) I post calls for prose and poetry editors, and I encourage my followers on quohtable to apply. Many do, and I feel grateful not only for the love that BWO receives but that quohtable receives, too. I vow to keep posting and engaging in this community more, thinking it ironic that I meant quohtable to sustain BWO and caused BWO to sustain quohtable.
Without my split decision to start this account, I think, without my melodrama, my embarrassing posts and pitfalls, I couldn’t do this.
Maheen, the new poetry editor, likes heartbreak poetry more than I do. She votes “yes” on poems I might have undervalued, and we begin to accept more pieces about heartbreak. I stop reading Dickinson and start reading modern poets, posting quotes from other literary journals I love, my feed filling with endless emotion about race, gender, illness, and even relationships. One night, unable to sleep and head spinning with thoughts, I scrawl onto a scrap piece of paper, “The worst subject for a poem is heartbreak. The only subject for a poem is heartbreak.” I hang it on my bulletin board, to remind myself.
When I first pitch this feature to Maheen and Marriah, I do it not because I love short poetry but because I want to challenge myself. Not all short poems are melodramatic Tumblr quotes, I think, and not all short poems are about heartbreak. I worry, though, that we’ll receive piles of angsty prose-poems, full of sadness and relationships ending. And we do get poems about heartbreak, but: they’re good. Even among the ones we choose not to publish, even among the ones that do use old images and feel cliche, they’re real. The lines house real pain, real emotion, real people, behind everything. What I once thought was mere, stupid heartbreak is a deeper human truth, perhaps the deeper human truth.
Almost exactly a year after I started quohtable, I wrote, “You pride yourself on being complex and having complex emotions, but sometimes things are simple, and that is not a bad thing.” I should’ve listened to myself. I should’ve let myself express, on- and offline, the heartbreak I felt. I should’ve owned quohtable, the place that was simple, the place that was home. The girl behind quohtable.
Though Fingertips spans genres and themes, it houses more poems about heartbreak than we’ve ever published before. In “My Short and Indifferent Reflection on You Leaving Me for No Bloody Reason.” by Nawaal K. (someone I met through quohtable before she ever submitted to BWO, someone whose writing and worldview I strongly appreciate), the main speaker recalls, “I shed my skin / I bite the apple / the universe rewinds / I bite the apple.” She chooses her fall, and when the universe around her rewinds, she chooses to relive it exactly the same way, embracing her mistakes, turning them into agency and growth instead of mistakes.
Lucia Liu, in discussing her story “Temporary,” says, “My advice is to place trust in yourself and your pen—don’t hesitate to voice your opinions through writing, no matter how controversial or ‘bad’ your words may appear to you… I believe we should feel free to pursue our own styles and topics in life and writing.”
I want to finally trust in myself, trust in my pen, trust in quohtable. In an interview with Jess for thishappypage (her account has grown large enough to start an interview series), I say, “The act of reforming thoughts that already exist, rewriting poems you’ve already written, rediscovering something you thought you already knew—it’s not only an element of a good life but the crux of it.” I’m glad I’m no longer the angsty fourteen-year-old girl I once was, but I’m also glad I was her. I’m glad I knew the power of heartbreak, moved beyond it, and rediscovered it anew. Somewhere inside, I’m still the same person who started quohtable. I still own all those emotions and experiences; I’m finally ready to own those emotions and experiences.
Before launching this feature, I thought about removing old posts, the melodramatic scenes with my ex and “things I’ll never say,” but I couldn’t force myself to press the “delete” button. I did say those things. I exist there, in an archive, a diary, a real form behind everything. I unblock everyone I know. I message various accounts and say, “Thank you.” No explanation, no need for explanation. Simple. I bite the apple. My heart fills with what I know is joy.
So pursue heartbreak in your writing, pursue simplicity, pursue every wild whim and inclination. Start an Instagram account because you want to. Start a literary journal because you can. Fill short poems with as much love, sadness, and life as you can. As Prisha Mehta says in her interview, short poems are “like sparks caught in time, fragments of pure thought and emotion.”
Quohtable is, too. I am, too. The writings and writers featured here are, too. I hope you recognize their humanity, feel their stories, repeat them aloud, and think, “Oh.”
Courtney Felle
Editor-In-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
