Zoe Berg, Sophie Henry, Jessai Flores

Poetry created from pieces of graffiti in the stacks and confessions from @yale.confessions on Instagram. Every word below was written by someone else, with only some added punctuation.

I 

in stacks | I want to die lmao. Fuck this | Fuck my 

life | it’s today | everlasting | midterms | for a 

juvenile. | You’ll look back at these times and | lose 

your | mind don’t matter | in the way of your education

II

How good it feels to fall for | a wilful child | yearning 

and longing for us | dark and deep, | it’s beautiful 

outside | cause I’ll be home | in your dreams. | I 

love | U so sexy.| I feel | You, too, are wonderful

III

I cradle | an endowment the size of a medium country’s GDP but

can’t | Look out for | the best version of myself. | I’ve been

struggling with | idealizing the ivies | but I have no | fda

approved antidepressant | just | the red pill 

IV

I spent four years | being a SLUT, | getting it on in 

sterling, | always so HORNY. | even if | hookup in

stacks went well | I’m still | everyone else. | What 

is | this hopeful, scared, happy feeling? | I bet you

don’t know | if you’re up here

V

There’s still time | to | realize how lonely 

I am | to choose | bodies, possessed by light — | the 

source of great strength. | my friends | said gaslight, 

gatekeep, girlboss | It seems like I’m fucked | Unless 

you’re literally | just someone to hook up with

VI

One day this will all be | the noise | I want to 

fuck | Death is coming | But please, this time | Look 

up; look out | to return to | something admirable and 

important. | This desk is good for watching the sun set

VII

I am | no more than a drop in the ocean, | but I | was here

Author’s Note

There are incredibly few spaces on campus where students have the opportunity to be anonymous, and the two most popular spaces are complete opposites in terms of history, function and medium. Sterling Memorial Library’s stacks are just over 90 years old, while @yale.confessions opened its virtual doors just a few months ago. My goal was to find out whether both of these anonymous spaces ended up revealing the same things about the student body. Are there similar themes that emerge when we’re allowed to say anything without fear of repercussions? Is everyone secretly thinking the same things? Could we even count on anonymity to make people be honest? I, for one, think so. As one piece of stacks graffiti so eloquently puts it: “Something about high, lonely places makes you want to write profundities.” What do these profundities amount to? Why do these secrets matter to us? I think they reveal what lurks in the shadow of the University — everything we’re too scared to say to each other. Yes, we have complaints and worries, but underneath all that is still a sense of hope and wonder. Hopefully, this poem provides a snapshot of all of that and lets whoever reading it know that “everyone else is dealing with the same shit.”