This week’s poem, 15-year-old Lily Jessen’s “Never,” is the grand prize winner of the Telling Room’s 17th annual Statewide Writing Contest. The winner receives publication in The Telling Room’s annual anthology of youth writing, as well as a cash prize of $250. I love the candor and brio with which this poem refreshes the story of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, as well as its luminous fairy-tale imagery and the compassion it extends to all of the girls – and women – who might also resist growing up all the way.

Lily is in 10th grade and has written and published short stories and poems through Telling Room publications, Stone Soup Magazine, Skipping Stones, Incandescent Review and Root and Star. Her novel, “The Pipe Tree,” which won Stone Soup’s 2022 Annual Book Award, will be released by Stone Soup Publishing this spring. When she isn’t fanatically planning the complicated plot of her next story, you can find her participating in theater, curled up with a book or singing in her chorus. She lives in Cape Elizabeth.

Never
By Lily Jessen

There are only three places
where you can truly be freed of the trials of existing:
before, after, and never,

which is a conundrum of sorts, for me.
I do not want to die, but
I do not think I want to turn fifteen
either. I want to be like a Lost Boy,
skipping, barefoot, through the forests of forever, crying
to the canopy and the crows
a cacophony of defiant eternity that echoes
across the ocean, the divide,
to creep into the mainland
and hide in fairytales and lullabies—
a protest against what seems to be
the very fundamental purpose of childhood:
to grow up.

People keep asking me: Are you going to take drivers ed?
I want to answer that I have no desire to drive, I want to fly

on the wings of fairy dust, and land somewhere
green and lush and shimmering
existing only in the whispers before bed
where I can finally feel found.

And wait a minute, where are all the lost girls, and
what tore them away from the second star to the right?
They are drawn, pulled to become mothers, and may only sit by the window
growing old, waiting for either death
or Peter Pan to sweep them away— whichever comes first.

This is a poem for them, a hope that
their island will be a time capsule of the present,
without memory, only movement
through the fields and waters
on the toes of children, never to return.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Never” (2023), Lily Jessen by permission of The Telling Room.

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