Young Writers Society

april 8th, 2023 - great sand dunes

past the withered, twisted trees
with sand slipping between the exposed roots,
and the little creek, dry except for when
toe-high waves of mud-choked water
draw a line marking the park proper,
it's a long walk to the dunes,
and most people are happy to stop
and sit down and draw shapes in the sand
or grab it and huck it at each other
or just watch it fall between their fingers,
while half the people who do make it
to the first few little dunes
run up and down them a couple times,
see the others towering over their heads,
and decide they'd better call it a day.
not that I blame them - whoever's left
has to walk up ridges tall as skyscrapers
or half-lean, half-climb up the sides, either way
sand crumbling under their feet and threatening
to send them on their knees, make them crawl,
maybe even tumble them down the hill,
and all the while the sun has its eyes
on them and only them,
so the almost-white dunes burn to the touch
and the air carries away every drop of water
it can find, and even the wind
doesn't cool them down any,
and there's so many peaks and valleys
between them and the highest part of the dunes.

I'd hike it at night, is what I'm saying.

april 9th, 2023 - afraid of the dark

you my monsters born from behind the barely open doors of empty rooms after I turn the lights off, shadowy, humanoid, hunched to keep your heads from hitting the ceiling, dragging your arms along the ground, always waiting around the corners or in the shade of dimly-lit hallways, looming over my bed with long thin claws and mouths full of sharp teeth whenever I close my eyes or cover myself in blankets or turn away, god, I'm supposed to be a grown adult, logically you couldn't possibly exist, I keep the bedroom door locked and this stainless-steel wood floor white tile backsplash apartment's too new for ghosts and too bougie for monsters, but I wake up in the middle of the night and other than the occasional footsteps over my head and some asshole screaming down the highway in their motorcycle everyone else is asleep and it's so dark in here and I'm so alone the old old part of my brain fills the void with snarling hissing lurking crawling predators for me to hide from, and they magically go away when I turn on a light and drive up my electricity bill.

april 10th, 2023 - definitely not resentful

I'm sure your parents,
back in the days when you
had to write all your school essays,
sat you down at your desk
and made you spend hours
translating everything you'd already written
into a cursive they told you
was more professional, but
mostly looked like chicken scratch.
you made a mistake,
you had to erase it
with one of those crappy pink erasers
that left pieces of itself
all over the page, after
smearing anything it touched
so you could barely make out
what you wrote over it;
too many mistakes,
and you had to start the page
all over again.
and, of course, you had a habit
of forgetting what word
you wanted to write next,
stitching (?) sentences together,
drop or adding -ing forms of verbs,
mispelling words you'd thought
were always spelled like that,
erasing and rewriting and throwing away
the hours until you could see
shadows of couches and video game consoles creep up on you,
and you'd panic and beg for a break
because look, your siblings are sitting on the bed
watching some TV show about a taxi driver
asking people trivia questions in new york,
can't I please just take a little break?
can't I please just try again later?
can't I please wait until tomorrow?
and they'd say no, and you were stuck at your desk,
cheeks blazing, gritting your teeth,
every second a slap in the face,
crying (but not on the page, of course)
until it was done, you handed it in,
you got your A, you moved on.

and it definitely doesn't still bug you now,
I mean, there's probably some other reason
you keep staring at the clock on the wall
after the rest of the team's left,
feeling a pit in your stomach,
feeling like you're burning up,
feeling something scratchy
in the back of your throat,
maybe you're just sick, maybe that's it.

april 11th, 2023 - herons' nests

the herons used to build their nests
on the gnarled branches of massive trees
clustered together on a sandy island
at the center of a shallow, white-rimmed lake
they'd hunt for fish at, bending over
as low as they could with their long legs
and flapping their massive wings
in frustration over the prey they couldn't find
before throwing themselves into the air
and pointing their curved necks
in the direction of some other lake
to hunt fish in and drag branches out of
before heading back to their home with their catches,
alone on their trees but for the occasional gull
or hawk or eagle swooping by
(and also all the cars on the nearby highway,
but that's not a very romantic image,
so it's going in the parentheses).

and I thought the herons flew away
when a windstorm knocked their trees down,
only to find out a few months later,
while stopping for gas after picking up a mattress,
that they'd settled on the cell tower
outside the local costco, their slender bodies
and long beaks silhouetted in the sunset,
trying to build themselves new nests
in between all the posts and poles.
maybe someone will get tired of
all the swooping and squawking and bird droppings
and slightly worse 4G signal
and decide to chase them off
(if someone hasn't done that already),
but, as far as I know, the herons are somewhere
reasonably quiet and out of the way,
which is about as much as they could hope for,
given the circumstances.

april 12th, 2023 - lab safety

methanol doesn't want to stay put.
spill it in the fume hood and see the stains
shrink and fade away like dew in the mornings;
pour it into a cup and watch the level get lower
like a timer while you reorganize your cabinets
and calibrate your equipment and fill out paperwork
and whatever else you need to do before you actually get started;
break out one of those pasteur pipets and bulbs
and transfer it somewhere else as fast as you can because
it starts dripping the moment it leaves its container;
find a spray bottle for it and you have to keep that bottle away
from everything else - the bottle will use itself
if there's enough methanol inside. but hey,
it's a great way to wash out glassware and plastic
and leave behind nothing but a pungent smell
that goes away soon enough. plus, it's a solvent
than can dissolve what water can't,
let water carry away the rest. either way,
it's maybe too easy to forget that methanol
isn't exactly safe, especially when you decide
to dunk (gloved) hands in it to fish something out,
until you're not careful about replacing said gloves,
and the next morning you find the skin on your hands
blistered and red and your fingernails yellowing.
whoops.

april 13th, 2023 - fall before it remembers it's fall

piling out of the car
me mom dad my uncle grandma
together stumbling up the steps
and pushing open the door
and walking past rows of benches
to get into some mahogany room
(I could've sworn there was a tank
with a couple goldfish floating around?
maybe I'm thinking of some other place.
tempting to say it was here,
ironic as that'd be)
so we can talk to some receptionist lady.
yes, it'll be tomorrow,
sometime in the morning.
we'll lay him out
on the table by the pews,
dress him up, wrap him in a blanket,
put a curtain over the entrance,
anyone who wants to can see him,
thanks for the obit,
we'll have it on our website
in a day or two,
thanks for the information
(grandma handed over something -
a check? social security info?),
but don't worry about the money right now,
we can take care of that later.

and outside, not a cloud in the sky.
a little chilly, a little windy.
they're heading back to the car,
arguing over who's going to show up -
the great-uncles and aunts
still alive and not in arizona right now,
a few cousins, some friends -
and I'm staring up at the pair of weeping willows,
the only ones in town,
drooping their yellow leaves
over the street we take back home.

april 14th, 2023 - sacrificial robins

a robin giving me a side glance and a frown
before it hops along the sidewalk ahead of me,
chirps towards other robins nestled in the bushes,
flies up into trees branches in the hopes that
it can keep this big lumbering giant
with smooth pale feathers and long thin wings
away from its partner and nest,
its entire life spent honing its instincts
to put on the song and dance it needs,
maybe even sacrifice itself to the claws and talons
of something that barely even notices it,
something more concerned with book reports
and writing up lab procedures than, say,
cracking open eggs or hurling rocks at birds.
but fine, when it's that small, living in
a big sharp bloody fanged world,
it hasn't exactly had the privilege
to decide anything isn't a threat,
and I doubt it's able to put together
that something walking the same paths
at slightly different times day to day
in slightly different outfits day to day
is all one, non-threatening, disinterested thing,
and not a whole collection of possible things,
any of which could be a problem,
and I get to hear the robins sing
among each other in the mornings,
so I think I can forgive them
being a little misguided.

april 15th, 2023 - bent-necked goose

the geese flew back north and left behind
dried little green droppings to add color
to the brown grass lawns and fields,
and also one bent-necked goose in front of the frat house
that spent its waking hours
waddling its way up the slope
leading to the front door and waiting
for slouched backpack-wearing frat boys
to toss over some crumbs or popcorn
and whatever else they fed it,
and otherwise it'd hang out
between the closed sewer lid,
the rock path leading to the parking lot,
and the shed by the back of the house,
still too proud to sniff its way
over to the cars and beg for scraps,
but reminding everyone that it was there,
it couldn't exactly fly away
or forage around in the dirt,
and they probably didn't want a goose
starving to death on their front lawn.

I think they called animal control a couple times
before someone actually showed up
to take it away. I didn't see it
the last time I drove by there. hopefully
it's doing alright, or, worst case scenario,
they put it out of its misery.
probably the latter, if we're being honest here.

april 16th, 2023 - taking a linear algebra exam while sick

door open nod head
step cough step sniff
backpack floor
sit down blink blink pockets
pencil backup pencil
backup backup pencil eraser
roll toss between hands
phone scroll text brother
send memes eyes sore
set down clock ticking
ten minutes nine minutes
eight minutes no still nine
where is he his grades
there he is been a while
hey feeling confident no
fair do your best
I believe you
you've been working
your ass off reviewing
professor papers sign
top name date
wait five minutes
phone down on whiteboard
cap off hoodie off
to be sure okay rules
one hour don't cheat
hand in when done
headache swimming foggy
okay go matrices
rows columns systems
invertible inverse
multiply true if
goosebumps eyes sagging
vectors equations
don't remember come back later
thirty minutes twenty minutes
back still don't remember
guess keep guessing
partial credit ten minutes
good enough five minutes
double-check one minute
otherwise fine done
turn it over
nod head his way
talk for a bit
makes sense doesn't
oh right because
sorry hope it works out
there she is
talk to you later bye
go home bed

rachmaninoff op. 39 (nine etudes-tableaux) no. 6, sometimes called "little red riding hood and the wolf"

april 17th, 2023 - bugs everywhere

I wake up in the morning sometimes
to the gentle and soothing rattling
of some woodpecker banging their head
against a rain gutter like they think
there has to be bugs inside,
look, the metal makes a loud noise,
and it even bends, there must be something
lurking around in there (and okay,
maybe the woodpecker knows
there's better ways to get some food
and has some other reason to do this,
but I'm not interested in finding out
and being forced to sympathize
with a bird keeping me from going back to sleep).
and hell, it's not even the
sleek black-and-white body red-striped
woodpecker people make mascots out of,
but a red-yellow-black-tan-blue faced,
spotted-dashed-dotted bodied,
puffed-chest bibbed round fashion disaster
woodpecker zooming between the buildings and trees
and making me want to run for cover when I'm outside
in case they decide that my head
may, in fact, be hiding bugs too.

april 18th, 2023 - whoops the house got quarantined a week into the spring 2021 semester

got the news on a discord server
where everyone else was arguing
over how it'd happened
and what they needed to do now
and if it'd be a good idea
to pitch in money or food
or cleaning supplies or what have you
for everyone's sake,
while I logged out of discord
on my phone and computer,
walked away from them,
locked the door to my room,
crawled under the bed,
surrounded myself with boxes
and breathed in the smells
of dust and reheated pizza
while I screamed and cried
until my voice went hoarse,
oh god I have to tell my professors
and figure out online classes
and figure out how to order groceries
and I've got a lab-only class
I can't make it to anymore
and I can't fall behind in it
I might just have to drop it
and all because of him
why did he even do that
why did he think that was a good idea
he better think twice
before he shows his face around me again,
and so on until I got tired of myself
and dragged my leaky face
and aching body out
from under the bed,
grabbed my phone,
and started making calls,
because it wasn't like
I could unquarantine myself
at that point.

april 19th, 2023 - mountain chickadee

sometimes people call them cheeseburger birds
because they're supposed to make a noise
that sounds like someone saying cheeseburger,
but I can't say I've heard much out of them
other than some warbling and whistling and chirping
in between the needles and slowly budding pinecones
of the evergreens in the spring and summer,
assuming that's even them at all -
half the time I go looking for that black visor
and various-shades-of-gray body, I end up
coming face to face with some mud-colored house finch,
or the red-headed male house finch,
or a goldfinch in the middle of flying away,
or even just a squirrel scurrying down the bark
to dig up nuts they can't find in the dirt.