This work was first published in Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective Anthology, 2025. This anthology stands as a testament to the courage, creativity, and growth of a remarkable group of young poets who have spent seven months exploring the power of language and self-expression. The anthology is more than a collection of poems—it is a celebration of emerging voices, of stories told with boldness and vulnerability.
All of the poems can be read here on our website, or you can download the Young Writer’s Collective Anthology to read as a PDF.
Don’t take me by Alice Foxall
Please don’t take me yet
I have only just discovered how much better pasta tastes out of a bowl
and that if you blend the matcha powder with the syrup it stops them separating
I’ve only just perfected cooking chicken
(perfecting it once is once enough I won’t be doing that again but)
Lord, it feels good to know.
Please don’t take me yet, I met a girl.
I think I might love her.
I need the chance to try.
She smells like sleep and honey
and smiles like she knows things I don’t.
I finally have a routine for laundry.
My light can survive my dark and
there is in fact no use in fabric softener
or for gut health fizzy drinks
that taste as bland as city skies
Or holding onto my hatred for those who don’t apologise
like a God holds onto eternity.
I know
It was not so long I was wishing in reverse
for your hand to smite me and take me away from this place
where the chicken is always raw
and the pasta always goes cold
but I hope you didn’t hear me.
I get on with my brother now
in ways I never thought I could.
My favourite flowers have a name I can’t pronounce and
a smell I cannot describe
he brings them to me every birthday and Christmas.
Sometimes in between.
My optician’s appointment is next month.
My Spanish class starts next year.
My life starts after just one more heartbreak.
Please
To whoever it may concern,
Don’t take me
Just yet.
About Alice Foxall
Alice (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Having studied biomedical science at university her work is often sci-fi inspired. Her dystopian short stories and poetry podcast, The Project, was released in collaboration with Roundhouse this year. Her short film on being mixed-race and cultural dysphoria is currently being shown at the Migration Museum until Spring 2025. These themes are becoming more apparent in her work.