Young Writers Society

april 20th, 2023 - not really sure what I was expecting

of course, just when I'm sitting down
on a folding chair in the grass
with a third sandwich in one hand
and soda in a solo cup in the other,
having picked them up off the ground
after tugging on my hoodie cords
because I'm feeling a little chilly
under the shade of the overhanging roof,
my brother decides to start texting me.

first memes, then to say he'll be
changing his major for the third time
this semester (something with less physics
this time around), then to ask me
if there's any grouses up there
(wikipedia tells me there's a whole bunch of birds
called grouse - maybe it was a sage grouse?
I'm not going to look for that conversation,
and sage grouse live in southern idaho,
where's there more sagebrush bushes
than there are people, so let's go with that),
and maybe if I can send him pictures
pretty please.

I'm pretty sure I'd be able to spot
some goofy puffed-up white crest
and spread out black tail feathers
in the endless dead grass lawns
or among the horses wandering dirt fields
or among the cows grazing by creeks
or between the lava rock-covered hills,
but nope, can't say I've run into any,
much less had the chance to break out my phone
(or my camera, if I remembered to bring it)
and hope they don't book it
to the sagebrush because they're pretty sure
anything pointed at them must be a gun.

and, I mean, there's a couple hunters
in plaids and jeans and caps
standing by the sandwich table,
talking about the permits they need to get
and telling stories about things like
carrying deer carcasses up hills
in the hopes of eventually finding
where they parked their truck.
they did, in fact, take pictures
of sage grouses lined up on the back of their truck.
which is pretty impressive,
but I think my younger brother
wants living birds,
so that's a little unfortunate.

april 21st, 2023 - fever dream

I'm not really a naps kind of person,
mostly because I can't throw myself onto bed
and slam my head into the pillow
and close my eyes without the nagging thought
that I Could Be Doing Something.
doesn't matter what that something is
or whether or not I'd actually do it
if I wasn't trying to nap (I probably wouldn't),
but it's Something, and that must mean
I'm Wasting Time and Should Be Ashamed
letting the limited hours of my life
slip by like that, so,
after a bit of tossing and turning
and maybe getting so far as feeling my limbs
float in the air, I give up
and pull myself back up,
slouch over to the desk,
and continue pushing off that Something
because I'm too tired to do it right now.
even when I manage to fall asleep,
I wake up with bed head, dizzy, vision blurry,
lines from the sheets pressed against my cheek,
dragging myself everywhere and wondering
if I should go back to sleep (and I never do).

I'll nap if I'm sick and can't do anything
without wanting to throw up - worst case scenario,
I won't feel any worse than I did before,
and it's a nice opportunity
to wrap myself up in too many blankets
and turn off the lights and hide
in the corner of the room forgetting
the clock and chores and homework
and honestly even my name and face
and only paying attention to footsteps down the hall
and people talking on TV downstairs
and the fan hovering over my head
and the sun peeking in between the blinds
until I can hear whispers of conversations
from voices I don't recognize
and spot outlines of mountains
and have the kinds of dreams
that I forget about the moment I wake up,
other than that I dreamed something
and it meant a lot to me in the moment.

april 22nd, 2023 - teenage grackles

baby grackles - squished, stubby
gray lumps of fur - squawking
behind their moms whenever
they can take a breath,
either begging for worms
or just reminding their moms
that they exist, growing up
into gangly yellow-beaked,
black-and-white feathered
quiet(er) birds, still staying
by their moms' sides, but finally
glancing around at the mowed lawns
and trimmed trees and leashed dogs
and collared cats bathing
in the sunlight on their owner's
front steps drying after the rain
that brought out all the worms
wriggling smooshed diced drying up
in the puddles the teenage grackles
lock eyes on, starting to see the world
in terms of things to fly to
and things to fly away from.

april 23rd, 2023 - when I got covid the first time

the smell of toothpaste
stabbing me in the nose
already runny and swollen
and too big for my face
like my ears and eyes and lips
turning deep shades of red burning up
and my legs wobbling
even when I'm standing still
in front of the bathroom mirror
texting my brother because
the queen's family is flying
and driving and running back
to one of her scottish estates.
he thinks she'll die today;
I think she'll die later this week;
it's looking more and more like he's right.
and I've read all those articles
about the emergency broadcasts
and the month of mourning
and the way they have to shut down
the entire united kingdom, basically,
so I'm brushing my teeth
refreshing the the bbc twitter account
in-between jumping over
to a discord server full of brits
waiting for the news and whoops
she's dead the queen's dead wow
end of an era wow spit out my toothpaste
open the door over to the bannister
mom already knows she's got cnn on
head back take my shirt off
shiver put on deodorant and cologne
twitter and tumblr are breaking out
"and there is no queen of england"
memes flying everywhere everyone
losing their minds and
I've already lost mine
plus I'm having trouble
walking back to my room
and god I hope this isn't a bad omen
for me personally but otherwise
I've collected a bunch of coins
from other countries so maybe
I can find all the ones with her face
and trace out a history in metal
because what else can I do
right now?

april 24th, 2023 - my little personal hell

she said something like the sediments
in the bottom of the bottle act like a buffer
to keep the acid from neutralizing the base
or vice versa, either trapping that acid/base
or reacting with it, which is why I've spent
the last hour pipetting water onto a pH strip
trynig not to scream watching it
turn blue immediately, eventually hints of green,
little yellow splotches around the edges,
but still not enough, and meanwhile
I'm red in the face and my hand's cramping
so bad I have to take little breaks
each time before I press down on the plunger
and I've got that kind of growl in my stomach
that comes from pushing off my lunch break
and embarrassment because my co-workers
keep trying to give me advice or ask me questions
and it's not like I'm mad at them
when I nod my head or give them a little yes or no,
I just want this over with already,
but I'm not a social butterfly at my best moments
and my ability to form words goes out the window
if I'm even a little inconvenienced,
plus I know what I need to do,
however long it'll end up taking,
so if you could leave me alone
in my little personal hell,
that'd be fantastic, thanks.

april 25th, 2023 - reflecting themselves

you in the glass panes
walk closer farther away
veer off fade away
almost hide behind
people sitting at tables
striking conversations
about how much it rained today
or where they went shopping
or how much they've been working lately
they don't notice you
you could almost
touch the glass
feel your hand slip through
not come out the other side
hide in there
nothing for anyone to see
your reflections
reflecting themselves,
maybe at the edges
combine into someone
who maybe wouldn't
take the first chance they got
to give up that whole
corporeal body business
and float around
parallel to the world
because it's easier to watch
than live in, but instead
you turn the corner
and they all run together
and turn back into you.

april 26th, 2023 - the city of rocks

dad gets it in his head sometimes
that he doesn't want to give up now,
maybe he'll fix whatever problem he has
if he just keeps trying,
which is why we just spent an hour
stuck in grandpa's pickup
scrabbling over black rocks,
the suspension threatening
to buck us off our seats
save for the seatbelts catching us
leaning forward or swaying side to side,
when we weren't catching ourselves
on the edges of the seats
as dad pressed on the gas
and tried to force a stray tire
out of a hole, over a gap,
around a bend, getting us all
into and out of
a dozen different sticky situations
until we rolled up
to a barbed-wire fence
and a red private property sign,
and then we had to turn around
because the dirt road we wanted
was a little further up the highway.

grandma doesn't say much.
maybe she had a harder time
snowmobiling around the hills
back in the days it snowed here
and everyone took their cheap engines
and threw themselves up slopes,
bobbed and weaved between rocks,
cleared bumps and crashed
into the sagebrush scattered around
like icing on a desert cake.
that she'd pulled herself up
off the ground, ribs bruised
or seeing spots in her eyes
or feeling a pulled muscle in her arm
or shivering from a faceful of snow
enough that, decades after the fact,
this has just been a bumpy stroll
in the park until we finally reach
pillars and boulders and arches
spread out like the narrow streets
of some millennium-old
european capital tourist trap,
and we stay there long enough
for me to jump out,
snap some pictures,
remember all the stories
I've been told about rattlesnakes
sunning themselves
in the afternoon sun
or otherwise sleeping the day away
in all the crevices and gaps and holes
around me, and I get back in the car.

april 27th, 2023 - great horned owls

doves perched on gutters
cooing softly between each other
(because they don't have the confidence
of their pigeon cousins
to waddle around on the sidewalk
and try to mooch off the nearest human),
joined in every now and then
by a low rumbly hoot
like how the double basses in an orchestra
adds a bit of depth to the other instruments
(uhhh who even knows
what a double bass looks like,
it's like a violin
but taller than you
and it looks like you play it
by leaning awkwardly over it
and giving yourself calluses
and also some back problems
plucking and/or stretching a bow
across strings as thick as your fingers,
and the sound's so low
it barely projects, so
you might be doing your job
and nobody would really notice,
but yeah this metaphor's
running away from me,
and I should get back to the poem).

but even hearing a great horned owl
is a once in a blue moon
kind of situation, much less seeing one,
and that's only because
they decided to settle down
on the roof long enough for me
to peek between the blinds and catch them
wiggle their little gray ear tufts
and twist their head every which way
and blink their huge orange eyes
and wear a constant frown
on their sagging feathered face.
mom told me once, when we were
stuck at an intersection
waiting for the light to turn green,
that an owl can be considered
an omen, a harbinger of death
in some cultures (you know,
normal small talk), but
they've always struck me
as tired, that they just
want to fly back to their tree
and crawl in their little hole
and not have to deal
with the crows nipping
at their wings,
the hawks and eagles
barely visible circling overhead,
and people like me
trying to get a good angle
for a slightly less blurry picture
before they swoop off.

[wrote this down in an old notebook, and I was going to show pictures, but it's late and I don't want to figure out how to upload images, so here's a transcript]

april 28th, 2023 - in writing



xxvii. the big dipper points the way we need to go

4/28/23

wow, it's been a while,
hasn't it? six months
since I've written anything in here;
about 3 or 4 years
if we ignore that class
I took on the history
and culture of walking
(and, uh, that other thing
hanging out up there).
there's notes for my second novel,
long poems about how I'm scared
to go to college and experience
The Real World for the first time,
smut that should never
see the light of the day,
just waiting for me
to pick it up and flip back through it
and cringe at how naïve,
how clueless, how hamfisted
it all was (and I'm sure
I'll say the same
about what I'm working on right now
when I'm 25 or something like that
because I still can't escape
the idea I've only been a Writer -
with a capital W - for the
last six months or so, so
for posterity's sake,
would it kill me to remember
I was trying my best,
and a lot of my favorite ideas
are older than I think they are?)

I used to write everything
even remotely creative
in journals like these. This is
the fifth, I think? The others
are covered, front to back,
in my weird little scrawl
bouncing above and below the lines,
trying to figure out
if it wants to be cursive or not,
smushing a's and u's and o's together
and m's and n's and r's together,
except it used to be smaller,
neater, maybe a bit colder
if we want to get all metaphorical,
like I'm not trying to write so pretty
and instead be honest,
but it's really because
I ditched these journals
for the siren song
of the computer/laptop/phone.

a bit of a shame -
there was/is something
visceral about the scratch
the pencil makes against the paper;
all the marks left behind
as I erase things;
the way I'm stuck
with whatever rambling mess
I've created;
the way my hand cramps
before I take a break
and flip the pages and see
how many lines I've written,
see the directions I've taken myself,
feel like I've actually done something.
the little word count at the bottom
of some Word document
just doesn't have the same weight -
I can't imagine a thousand words
versus a few pages.

but it's much harder
writing elaborate high fantasy
and/or urban fantasy stories
with huge casts and complex,
interwoven plots if I constantly
have to pour over these things
to find a sentence or two
of background information
I came up with randomly
waking up from a dream
at 3 in the morning, then
forgot I ever brought it up until
I needed to remember it,
so I'm not sure this journal
is ever getting finished, much less
the couple empty ones
collecting dust in my old room.
maybe I'll give them to someone else.
maybe I'll copy everything in them
onto my computer and let them rot.
they were fun for a little while,
and a little fun to come back to now,
but I think I've found ways
to pass the time
that don't demand
so much from me.

cw: references to death

april 29th, 2023 - in sickness and in death

grandpa's never going to know
that I finally got the job
I'd spent months searching for.
and hell, I could've gotten it sooner
if I'd accepted I'd be coming out of college
with next to no experience and therefore
I could have lowered my standards/hopes a little bit
and taken that smaller paycheck
all the way to the bank
and then tried to explain to him
what it is I do
only to watch his eyes glass over
after a sentence or two about fluorine
and forever chemicals and analysis
and one of us would have hung up
and he'd have driven around town
in his pickup telling the other farmers
that I was doing something
about the stuff in the water
he's heard about on the news,
and he doesn't get it,
but he's proud of me regardless.

I always figured when my relatives died
it'd be drawn-out, like
their kidneys were failing
or their cancer was terminal
or their diabetes was catching up to them,
and I could drive/fly up with my family
to spend a couple weeks around a hospital bed
trading stories, laughing at old mistakes,
bringing up old friendships and flames,
and learning something about
the way a family sticks together
through however many rivalries
and mildly traumatic childhoods
we've put each other through,
and maybe getting some things off my chest
about how I wish we could've
spent more time together.
but no, one morning in october I woke up
and was brushing my teeth
when mom knocked on the bathroom door
and told me grandpa was dead
and asked me if I wanted to head up
to idaho (like that was even a question?
yes, of course, obviously).
it sounds like it was a surprise
to him too, walking out of the shower
and sitting down at the table
and slumping/almost falling
to the floor, just about dead
before the ambulance rumbled
down the long road to his house.

the last time I texted him
was a few months before,
to tell him happy birthday.
I don't remember exactly
the last time I talked to him.
after the fact I can imagine
all kinds of conversations
we could've had,
vacations I could've taken
to wander southern idaho
to go hunting for deer
or stand at the bridge
over the snake river canyon
or even just roam the cow fields
in-between rusting plows
and electric fences, but
here I am, hiding in my room,
like I've always been.

everyone likes to wax poetic
about how death is inevitable
about how death gives meaning to life
about how immortality would be boring,
but nah, I still want to live forever,
yes, I think I'm built different,
there's so many places I could go to
and hobbies I could pick up
and things I could learn,
and I'm going to die screaming and crying
that it could've ever happened to me,
like that soviet astronaut
I heard about once
who knew he was flying up
in a rushed, poorly-built spaceship
and figured he wouldn't make it back
to the earth in one piece
when the parachutes didn't deploy,
so he raged his way
through the atmosphere,
a comet slamming into the ground.

april 30th, 2023 - midday moon

I had the rest of the day off,
probably because it was close to finals
and my classes were wrapping up or ending early,
though honestly I'm not quite sure when this was
because here the evergreens live up to their name
and the grass is only green for a couple weeks
and the flowers bloom whenever they want
and it likes to rain and snow and hail
in spring and early summer and fall,
but, whatever the case, I decided
to throw on my hoodie, grab my water bottle,
and see how far that dirt path
leading off the sidewalk stretched
into the purple mountains.

which was how I found myself walking
down narrow grooves in the ground
surrounded by trees hanging so low
their leaves kept smacking me in the head;
the tunnel underneath the local highway
with an inch of water pouring gently down the incline
to my right and to my left graffiti
in big blocky letters about classes and math puns
with a little bit of BLM and ACAB thrown in there;
winding switchbacks littered with rocks
and shriveled cacti whose needles
still poked out on all sides, reminding me
to be careful when I had to step aside
for the bicyclists and hikers heading by;
the long rising ridges riddled with sagebrush
alongside dips turning into ravines
with evergreens towards the bottom
to catch my fall if I somehow forgot how to walk
and rolled a thousand feet down to them;
the wooden steps leading up to and by houses
perched precariously on the edge of that road
curving its way around the mountains
with barriers only set up here and there,
which you'd think would be enough
to stop drivers from hurling themselves
up and down and through the bends,
but I had to sprint my way over to the other side
just in case anyone tried anything funny
and caught me deer in headlights
right before an improvised parking lot
and the trail higher ever higher above me.

I don't think I filled the bottle
before I started, so eventually I ran out
and felt the sun weighing down on
scorching blistering my neck and shoulders
when the forest wasn't swallowing me
and shrouding me in dust, pine needles,
rustling in the bushes I convinced myself
could be hissing snakes or deer looking for a fight
or mountain lions looking for some easy prey,
especially when my legs started to shake
and the air started to pull itself
out of my lungs even as I stopped between the rocks
to give myself a minute, then paced around a bend
a bit faster to catch sight of anyone
tromping along in boots, snippets of conversation
floating behind them reminding me
I wasn't alone, and the chirping and warbling
of birds hiding themselves in bushes
let me know that they hadn't seen anything
worth shutting up about or flying away from,
so I was probably in the clear.

and eventually when I looked back down the valley
I was so high up I could see the midday moon
a pale ghost over the flat-topped mesas
and houses and trees crawling up their sides
and behind them denver hazy almost floating
at the edge of the sky skyscrapers waving
factories belching roads teeming with cars
and I laughed I kept laughing god my life
played out a tiny dot on that endless plain
and now I could see almost everything save
turn around the path kept going ever higher
up there a road by the mountaintops
a few cars alongside the railing hikers
making their way through the forest sea
sprinkled with snow and if I could grow wings
and throw myself to the top
but the flesh was weak and the spirit
was also pretty weak and I thought I'd done enough
for now, at least I got to make it as far
as I did, I'll be back eventually
and I'll even be prepared this time,
but I needed to head back down
and get back into the house
and chug a gallon of water
and open the door to my room
and fling my shoes off
and throw myself onto the bed
and take a break.