24th Street

24th Street came out of a prompt I almost didn’t pick: if a machine could erase someone’s memories, but those memories returned later, slightly altered, whose memories would you erase? I had twenty minutes to think and thirty to write, and I spent the first ten of those thirty doing nothing, sitting with a prompt I’d chosen mostly because I disliked the others less. The poem that came out is about a narrator who kills a man in self-defence, then erases her own memory of it out of guilt, but the memory comes back wrong. It returns as something she did deliberately, for no reason at all, just because she wanted to. The poem isn’t really about the killing. It’s about what’s left once the story you tell yourself about your own actions stops being reliable — guilt, womanhood, the fragile architecture of how a mind protects or condemns itself.

I didn’t plan the structure going in; there wasn’t time to. The first stanza arrived almost as panic: short, clipped lines, a narrator running from something she’s already trying not to look at. “I should’ve known” became a refrain almost by accident, repeating itself the way an intrusive thought repeats.

The real turn happened by accident, with about a stanza’s worth of time left and nothing to write. I went back to a stanza I’d already written, “i can’t do this / i can’t live like this / his face haunts me” and realised I could use it again, at the end, with one word changed. The first time it appears, it ends in “his memory must go.” The second time, it ends in “i must go.” Same rhythm, same haunting, but the meaning underneath it flips entirely — from erasing him to erasing herself. I hadn’t engineered that as a twist; I stumbled into it because I ran out of time and ideas, and it happened to be exactly the right thing.

My teammates and I reviewed it together afterwards, in the fifteen minutes we were given, and I remember both of us pausing on it: Is this too dark, too much, for a regional writing round? We left it as it was. I submitted it not expecting much, especially next to my teammates, who are genuinely excellent writers and went on to place 25th and 26th, a silver medal finish. I placed 17th out of 200.

We never got the poem back after the round, so the version that exists now is one I rewrote from memory once I got home. It’s close to the original, not identical; a few lines may have shifted slightly in the retelling, but the structure, the repetition, the ending, all of it held.

I still very much like this poem. There’s nothing I’d change about it, even though it came out of a kind of panic state. None of it was intentional, not really. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, I’m going to write about guilt, I’m going to write about a woman blaming herself before she blames the situation. It just came out of me. I think that’s part of why I don’t want to touch it now.

Placing 17th changed something in how I see myself as a writer, not because I needed the validation to know I was good, but because there’s a difference between believing that about yourself and having it reflected back by people who don’t know you, who have no reason to be kind about it. My friends weren’t surprised at all, which honestly says more about how they read my writing than how I do. It was less of a discovery and more of a confirmation of something I already half-believed but hadn’t had reason to fully trust yet.

The “what it means to be a woman” thread comes from the line “I should’ve known, I shouldn’t have gone that way.” That’s such a specific, recognisable reflex. Something happens to a woman, and the first instinct, hers and everyone else’s, is to go back and ask what she could have done differently, rather than asking what happened to her. I didn’t sit down to write that into the poem. It just surfaced because it’s a thought pattern I already recognise, in myself and in how I watch other women narrate their own fear.

I rewrote it from memory only a few days after the competition, not months or years later, so I wasn’t reconstructing it from nothing. But I don’t think you can recreate the adrenaline of the original under any conditions — that pressure, that specific thirty minutes, isn’t something you can simulate after the fact, even if you remember every line. Rewriting it didn’t change my relationship to the poem itself. What changed was how I think about writing in general, that some of my best work isn’t going to come from sitting and deliberating. Sometimes it just has to be forced out of me by a clock running down.