moments like these, by Julianna Crandall

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

At the age of fifteen, broken-hearted and full of some insatiable, unknown longing, I looked myself in the mirror and wrote a poem. It was simple, it was sweet, it changed everything and nothing. Adolescence is such a delicate time where up seems down and left seems right; for me, putting the chaotic and unknown into words allows what is blurry to shift back into focus. For that fifteen-year-old girl, that first moments like these poem became a cornerstone that shaped the foundation of the rest of her teenage years.

These are letters to myself. These are little checkpoints along the road I call my life. There always have been and always will be moments like these, where we become aware of the bittersweet, magnificent burden it is to live. Welcome to the inner mind of a past version of myself, spanning ages 15 to 18, in which I attempt to swallow life’s bitterest pills and sweetest desserts. There are moments like these, many more moments to come.

Julianna Marie Crandall is a twenty-year-old emerging author and poet, currently studying for her BA in English: Creative Writing at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has had two works previously published through the Southern Lakes Anthology in poetry and prose. Julianna hails from Milton, Wisconsin, where she grew up with her parents, two siblings, and hundreds of miles of near-empty backroads. Her endless love affair with life leaves her constantly attempting to put the human experience into words. It is by God’s grace alone that she ever succeeds in doing so.