Young Writers Society

9. you hurricane 4.15.22

10. perspective 4.16.22






10. perspective (version 2) 4.16.22

11. monthly musings interlude: march 4.16.22

12. the reaching bird 4.20.2022

13. this is the origin of my collecting 4.22.2022



i am collecting synonyms for boats, in case i start to drown again. oceans are infinite, rivers are comfortingly-finite. and i can only swim when i can see the shore. this is the linguistic origin to my word collecting and anchor leaving.

i. the hollow cup your hands make when trying to catch rain water, might also serve as a make-shift boat; if the weather turned. the human body is remarkable that way, in how we can float and even fly when necessity requires it. promise me you will not take this for granted.

ii. we learned to build arks because the flood waters came. before people learned to use boats, with ribs turned into oars and lungs into sails, we all were fish and knew instinctively where the river began. i am achingly nostalgic, so places like galaxies and constellations do not draw me, but i swear if you show me the tattered edge of the note you accidentally laundered three years ago, i will fold it back into a paper boat and bind its anchor to my dreams, because i have such a very hard time letting go of anyone i’ve loved, and i am still trying to learn to breathe without gills.

iii. you can pretend that this poem is a raft with which to carry you if you feel like it. you can pretend almost anything if you need to. you can pretend you know where you're going; that the stars are leading your north. you can pretend you haven't been here before. i like to pretend the ocean isn’t infinite if only to imagine that heaven is closer than it appears. i like to imagine faith is more like floating than gravity makes it seem.

iv. sometimes the water dries in the river-valley, and for a season we have no need to fear for drowning, so we plant our crop-rows where the tide used to drag us in, and we forget how to swim and build our homes on flood-plains despite the warnings of our Mother, because the ground seems fertile here; and we are reckless. there is a bitter strangeness to growing (older / up / or wherever the place between the sky and the heavens and here is) when the grooves carved against your memories fill in with weeds and you pretend you are a garden only to give your Mother one less reason to worry when the clouds are brooding and the forecast calls for rain.

v. there is something horribly tragic about messages in bottles. and a fine line between being safe and being trapped; every word stuffed into glass with double-intent; to be read / unread, to be known / unknown; to be lost / unlost; the ironic fortune / unfortune in the vulnerability of a fish at the end of a fishing line. and is that not how home sometimes feels? a place you are invisibly latched to, and the memory that makes you rootless. but i'd rather throw this all back into the river before i become all sea-sick with nostalgia again. 

vi. there are six months of the year that we chase the sun, and six that we run, and i have only ever lived on one half of the horizon, but long-ago i became an insomniac which i call “nocturnal” if only to sound more romantic, and i wonder if maybe along the way i forgot which way the earth is turning, just as every sea-vessel one day forgets if we are following the shore or running from it. this is another reason i always wonder if i’m lost. and another reason i still pretend i know where i am going.

14. across the sands of time 4.23.22

15. just again 4.23.22

Collaborative Poem: Who Am I? with @rida & @AlmostImmortal

What am I, if
not statues
piled up on each other?
the broken limbs,
the marble eyes- -
the perfection of
their imperfection
makes me.
I am nothing, if not
pretend.

I am an unplanted garden, overgrown
I am an arid lake, tide-turning
I am the morning, without the sun
I am the night, without the fireflies
but for all this careless, half-hoped pretending,
I promise you, I know who I am.

Stop painting portraits over my mirrors
and sewing new names on my clothes.
You’re stuck in the storm of delusion.
You don’t recognise the skin you’re trying to define.
But I’m not a word in the dictionary.
And your kind holds no power here.
Stop taking a sharpie to my identity.
I promise you, I know who I am.

Collaborative Poem: The Sun Watches Over with @Plume & @Liminality

Sun beams peek into window blinds drawn closed
resting their rays upon sleeping eyes, prodding awake
the day stretches open, dew drops glistening,
bird chirps summoning the morning to stir again

here awaken dandelions, here awaken worms.
thirst leftover from stars is quenched by dewdrops and
grass blades chop breezes in half, as
a lazy dragonfly buzzes.

Balmy evening air,
when the insects return dreaming,
the sun is a half-disc on the horizon.

Hi alliyah!

I really like the lines "where do you hope/ she is going?" from 12. reaching bird. It kind of pulls you in and makes you relate to the poem more.

10. perspective is really interesting as well. I think it gives a good sense of who the speaker and the addressee are, and I love the idea of shaping the words to bend around the edges of a 3-D object.

In 14 the observation about how the whole ocean is passing over that single grain of sand is really interesting. I like how you contrast the size of the sand grain with the mountains it came from and the sea and bring it all together. And poem 15 is really lovely and hopeful.

Great poeting, and happy NaPo!

This poem is heavily inspired by @PoetryGoos, and I am sorry that it disrupts my ~aesthetic~ a little bit, but maybe I'll make another origami bird and throw it in here later to make it work.

For now...

16. GOOS after PoetryGoos 4.23.22

17. you need not write back 4.23.22

18. just don't- 4.23.22

19. storm time liturgy 4.24.22

20. dreams of flight 4.24.22



Author's Note: so this one is a little light on the word-poetry; but I thought this picture that I took is in itself quite poetic and would probably consider it an object poem - there's just something about it that I really like. So we'll go with it!

21. i would become the ocean - if only 2.25.22