SWS: Instructions for Disappearing Challenge Winners

For Instructions for Disappearing, we asked for poems written like guides to vanishing. Not recipes or roadmaps, but rituals, whispers, and warnings. You gave us disappearances that were bodily and brutal, quiet and dreamlike, haunting and necessary. Some slipped away gently, others tore themselves out line by line.

These are the poems that didn’t just tell us how to disappear, but showed us what gets left behind.

🏆 Winners

S̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶F̶i̶n̶a̶l̶e̶ by Lamar Wiggins

Lamar's finale plays like a closing scene that's sharp and cinematic. Images flicker and fade, leaving you with the sense of a character stepping offstage before the lights cut out.

Hunger by Jen Parkhill “JP”

JP's guide to vanishing is raw and unsettling, a body dissolving into appetite until even language is consumed. It is visceral, unforgettable, and impossible to shake.

How to Disappear. by Lindsay Coon

Lindsay Coon's instructions start like a step-by-step manual but slowly slip into something dreamlike. It is lush, strange, and haunting in the way it teaches you to let go.

How a girl disappears by ᔕᗩᗰ ᕼᗩᖇTY

ᔕᗩᗰ ᕼᗩᖇTY's poem does not let you look away. By pairing statistics with lived reality, it turns disappearance into a stark reminder of trauma’s shadow.

It Happens Incrementally by Lightning Bolt ⚡

Lightning Bolt's entry builds with a relentless rhythm, commands piling until the voice itself begins to vanish. The effect is urgent, sharp, and hard to forget.

🎖️ Runners-up

• How to Disappear Gently by Luna Jordan
• how to vanish like the summer by Gina C.
• Old Fashioned Dissolve by Ellie Hoovs
• How to Disappear (When You Were Never Here At All) by River and Celia in Underland
• 10 Simple Steps by Raine Neal
• How to Disappear by David M
• a love story, post-mortem by Mallory Rose
• Disappearing From His Grip by Autumn S.
• The Idiot’s Guide to Sentience Oblivion by The Dani Writer
• Leave No Trace by caleb paschall
• How to Disappear (If You Want to) by A. S. Lawrence
• Spindleshanks by Mackenzie Davis
• Instructions for Vanishing by Bernard Bleske
• Next Thought by Ariana GonBon
• Instructions for Disappearing by Imola Tóth

🏅 Honorable Mentions

• How to Disappear by Faceless Lim
• How to Vanish Without Anyone Noticing by Elizabeth Healy
• Starry night melting by Antoni De'Leon
• how to disappear by Katherine J. Zumpano
• Be fun by Millicent Malcolm
• Goodbye by Heather Elle
• Fading by Alison McBain
• The Wind by Lauren Everdell
• Becoming the Black Hole by Kaitlin Oster
• The Spotlight by Lizz Chambers

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A quick note: the curation team is off next week, we'll be back with the results for Leave the Light On on Friday, September 5th.