Young Writers Society

@alliyah thank you so much!! <3 I'm especially glad you enjoyed the abecedarian, it was a really fun form to work with.

zugzwang xii


I feel the edge of summer
tingling at the back of my brain,
bumping up against my consciousness
like a boat gently nudging its dock
with the quiet pulsing of the waves.

I’ve never felt it quite this way
before, the spring.

Years of downwards spirals,
taking a nosedive straight into May,
a sea of papers and projects and
the unrelenting tide of solitude

have made me a creature of habit,
one used to rejecting the offerings
of warmer weather.

But this:
I feel the earth shifting, plants shivering
and stretching towards the sun,
the bare dirt cracks a smile and bursts
into new shoots and green growths.

It’s the feeling of being a new shoot
myself, after spending so long thinking,
I am a weed. I was made to be stepped on,
I tell myself,

There is life.
This is the earth’s promise in summer:
renewal.

zugzwang xiii

“you will always know how to ride a bike.”
I’ve watched it come true,
wheels spinning beneath her
taut arms, hair unfurling from helmet.
she knew before I ever taught her.

there is a way in which some things
will always be familiar:
the way we work together in the kitchen
brushing shoulders, interpreting
each other’s silences.

zugzwang xiv

the eyes are the windows
to the soul;
I watch the way you
watch the world,
the subtle shifts when
we both draw the
same thing, differently.
I see the way other eyes
pass over you, or pay attention,
but never latching tight
like you’re the image they want
to hold in their minds forever
(the way I do).
In the photograph of your eyes
clear blue-grey-gold, I see
the you that you would hide
the vulnerability you deny—
the truth to which I would give
my love.

zugzwang xv


Teach me how to remake a shattered world,
how to see the future in the clear, curved glass
of a tall-necked bottle marked слива;

how to accept the gifts of the earth, to take
the proffered flowers from the hand of a friend
(without thinking in circles around inevitable decay)
and fill the glass again with water, with liquid sunlight;

to stop time for a moment and hold a sunburst of petals,
to watch the light of it spreading across the faces of those
that I love.

Teach me how to heft the smooth bottle in my writing hand,
how to let the cool weight settle into my palm without
dashing it against the floor.