Anastasia Helena Fenald (b.1992) is a second-generation Ukrainian-Hispanic-American poet from California’s windy High Desert. She has a B.A. in Global Studies from the University of Riverside, California (2014) and an M.A. in Globalization and Development from the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom (2015). Known for her fun attitude and feisty poems, she spends most of her free time devouring fanfiction, teaching poetry workshops with the Community Literature Initiative, and forgetting to drink water until bedtime.
Her latest poetry collection, The Art of Job Hunting: A Dramedy in Verse, was published by Riot of Roses Publishing House in late 2023. Her first poetry collection Help Me, I’m Here: Poems to Myself, was published by the World Stage Press.
She has also been published in Sheila-Na-Gig Online Journal, Acid Verse Literary Journal, The Sims Library of Poetry’s anthology Poems in Praise of Libraries,
innateDIVINITY books’ anthology A Case for the Personhood of Trees, A Thousand Flowers Anthology, and more.
DEAR LITTLE ME
One day, you’ll want to be called Anastasia. One day, you’ll grow into me. One day, a little sooner than later, you learn you are the sum of your experiences, not your accomplishments.
One day, you’ll understand why you feel lonely—that no love is greater than the love of yourself. What point is romance if you only possess a hallowed heart? What point is love if you’re only dripping in self-hatred? One day, you’ll stand next to your lonely and you will forgive her and welcome her in your open arms.
One day, you’ll stop writing, too busy pursuing perfection than dreaming. This will be the hardest lesson to learn—you will never be perfect, your dreams aching the chance to grow. You sit here wanting to be perfect like a statue, like a work of art, but you are already glorious with your every breath.
One day that turns into many days, everything will hurt. Everything will be sand scraping against your skin, scarring you with the reminder of everything you could have been; everything will be suffocation as you stuff yourself small into countless boxes. Everything will be life static in your hands and you’ll want to vanish, flicker away like channel 3 when the TV turns off dead.
But one day, you’ll write again; you’ll see yourself in the mirror, pause at the ugly that reflects there and find beauty in the warm blood of your skin. One day, you’ll wake up, ready to live, ready to be alive because you are tired of being cold, being empty, but still full of such doubt you’ve filled infinite Olympic swimming pools.
One day will become two days, then three days, then four days until all the above become every day. All the days meld together into love that shines like a constellation worth keeping, into light that survives years after we’re gone. You will fall in love with yourself, leaving humility at the door, running fast into your heart.
You will succeed, chase dreams, and be, never stopping; never letting life tell you’re “no one, you’re nobody”, when you are everything to me.
I know these are excruciating days; the pain sits so heavy on your shoulders. I know you want it all to end, but please wait for me. We are almost together, Little Me. You’ll see—our kind of love? It’s written in the stars.
Loving you now and forever,
Anastasia
HOW TO READ
(Youngest Voice)
Little Me saved her poetry,
wrote her heart page after page.
Her poems bloomed
across time years later.
[Older Voice]
A young woman falls
in love with flowered poems
she had once been.
She writes to heal all the hate
she cursed herself with.
The Voice in Between
A woman who knows both halves:
past and present.
Her name is Now:
she is me, who I am,
who I am still to be.
AWAY
(It’s 2006. I’m 14.)
The child cried all night.
Her self-esteem was very low.
She dreamed it away.
WE ARE NOT ALONE
Help is admitting there’s a problem;
a vulnerable confession;
a phone call away.
(please help me)
Help is a friend
or family.
(please someone help me)
Help is not being alone.
Help is my hand reaching out to you.
(please oh god help me)
[shh shh i’m here, I’m here]
If you enjoyed the darkness of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry as a teenager, but fell in love with the healing of Nikita Gil as an adult, then Help Me, I’m Here: Poems to Myself is for you. Part lonely and raw childhood poems and part ultimate self-love that blooms because of growing up and surviving, this collection is the conversation that people are too afraid to have with themselves.
“Anastasia Helena Fenald captures meeting your inner teen angst with empathy and radical self-love. Help Me, I’m Here is a moving collection of poems that will hold your heart in a warm and validating embrace.”
-Oombi Solis Flores, author of (Be)longing from World Stage Press
Help Me, I’m Here: Poems to Myself is both a gloriously heartwarming, but also a painfully heartbreaking collection of personal call and response poems between Anastasia Helena Fenald’s adolescent and adulthood selves. Her poems, or trios, focus on three separate voices: childhood, adulthood, and the sum total of who she is now. Witness the growth of her poetry written between the ages of 11 to 30, but also relish in the candid conversations of acknowledging and accepting the darkness that haunts us as we mature from child to adult.
Help Me, I’m Here is the epitome of hard-earned self-love, bringing the reader on a journey of self-discovery as Anastasia Helena Fenald becomes the adult her younger self has always needed–the person who loves her no matter what.
Owner and director of Higher Consultants based in Sandton, South Africa. I assisted with the creation of Los Poetry with Anastasia Fenald. I am a content creator, digital marketing expert, website designer and a qualified skincare therapist.