Community Poetry Journal

Community Poetry Journal

A collaborative journal for poetry YWS-ers have read!

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  • Created Wed Jul 21, 2021 1:34 pm

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  • Hijinks Admin
    Hijinks · Aug 18, 2022
    I'm not sure if this was written with the intention of being a poem, but I found it in an Instagram post about poetry (and traced it back to a New York Times article, here - it's the second story. Please note that a lot of the other stories featured in the article are not super appropriate!) and I thought it was so poignant and bittersweet. It's part of a collection called "Tiny Love Stories" that are all under 100 words, and this particular one is A Bookmark Near the End by Julia Nicole Camp.
    He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming that we wouldn’t work out long term. He said he loved me but that we had different interests. “What does love mean to you?” I said. “That’s an impossible question,” he replied. I, however, find love to be quite simple. Love is the stack of biographies on my nightstand with a bookmark near the end.

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    Liminality replied · Aug 21, 2022

    Oof that last line! This is a good one, Seirre, and I can totally see it working as poetry as well as prose. Thanks for sharing! :D Love the gif that you put together with it as well. The piece makes me think of something like optimism vs pessimism, or maybe faith vs doubt, since the narrator's action was based on belief that things 'could' work out if they just tried, whereas the other person's inaction seems to be based on a feeling that things are "impossible".


    Liminality replied · Nov 10, 2023

    Revisiting this a year later - this story still feels super impactful. Now I think maybe the difference between the narrator and the partner is in effort rather than optimism or pessimism, like the story depicts the partner as not trying while the narrator is. (And that love is about trying.)



I would be a terrible novel protagonist.
— mellifera