‘We have got to talk about all those kids in those Goosebumps books.’
Brenna Twohy’s poem Anxiety: A Ghost Story starts so amusingly, and so lightly.
It talks about all the ridiculous things that happen in those teenage fiction novels.
But then she turns the story, performed at August’s National Poetry Slam, on its head and talks about the horror story of having anxiety.
‘When I tell you about the ghosts that live inside my body,’ she says.
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When I tell you I have a cemetery in my backyard and in my front yard and in my bedroom, when I tell you that trauma is a steep slide that you cannot see the bottom of, that my anxiety is a camera that shows everyone I love as bones.