Artist Statement: “Backrooms” by Eliza Makhdoom

Now in its 56th year, University of Detroit Mercy’s Dudley Randall Poetry Prize continues Dudley Randall’s legacy of amplifying creative voices within our community. The 2026 1st prize winner is “Backrooms” by Eliza Makhdoom. Read the rest of this year’s prize-winning poems at udmercy.edu/dudley.

Backrooms

By Eliza Makhdoom

I would do anything for a cheap laugh.
I’m a worn out gossip magazine abandoned in a
fluorescently lit office
that still smells like the 2008 recession.
The last little strings of yellow wallpaper
,peeling off and scabbing over, its skin falling onto
the fax machine, it groans quietly
once again. The
vending machine spits out its last candy bar
somewhere not so far away.
The body of an office chair leans, exhausted,
against the wall in the very back corner.
The ceiling tiles weep a slow brown drip,
soaking the carpet through, like the bandage on
my left pinkie finger.
It runs across the floor as a dragged shadow
,feathered at the edges but darker in the middle.
Something crawled here and stopped, slept,and left
only what it had to.
Next to it there’s a small laugh in the wall, only as
thin as a crack, and
I press my ear to it.

Artist Statement–Eliza Makhdoom

Two decades ago, a random user on 4chan uploaded some construction photos of a furniture store. From there it exploded into a life of its own. People from all around the world gathered, virtually, and agreed that these photos were eerie, oddly familiar, and felt like this space was outside our own reality. Over the years this story has built upon itself into a tower of imagination, an endless maze of identical rooms and unseen creatures just beyond each corner.

However, watching all of this grow, the concept I find most haunting is the simplest. Those copied office walls that you can never escape, with only the occasional office supplies, are what inspired this poem. The feeling I get from The Backrooms is something almost indescribable, because how can you really describe infinity?

Imagine that with some stroke of bad luck you simply slip out of the world into a space never meant for humans to see, the testing grounds where reality itself is made. It’s something that could happen to anyone for any reason. You walk the halls desperately, scavenging around for some signs of life, but there’s only rot to accompany you. The yellow wallpaper peeling almost like your own skin and the chair seeming to hold years of exhaustion as it leans against the wall. 

The office in the poem is not just abandoned; it is slowly decomposing. The room seems to try to recreate a human presence, but it cannot, only reaching an approximation that cannot sustain itself. The Backrooms evokes something close to existential vertigo. How do you describe a place with no boundaries? How do you understand time when there is nothing to measure it against? Without proper landmarks, without other people, and without an exit, the mind begins to fill the emptiness with its own fears. Even a faint sound, like a small laugh behind a wall, can become everything.

Eliza Makhdoom is a second-year Biology major and Creative writing minor. In their free time they love creating art and annoying their cat.