Young Writers Society

Rule #1: Forward this to anyone who would be interested in this poetry storybook.
Rule #2: All posts will be written in poetic (free) form.



This entire storybook will be written from one person's perspective: a story of the death of a dear friend and the personal investigation into the man or woman responsible - for our narrator doesn't believe her friend died of natural causes. This storybook will explore all of the emotion and drama of accepting loss and empowering oneself to overcome grief to learn a greater truth, or perhaps accepting the darkness that the truth often holds.

The remainder of the premise will change as our character explores her world. She will experience romance, hostility, benevolence, and most of all, inward growth. The poems may be written in any form you so desire.

Breakfast With Ira

This is the morning, this
is the gentle breeze between
five fingers, stretched wide as a fan
held against the sun.
This is the sunrise, and we are alive.

The phone rings, a hummingbird on
whispered winds, and your voice is a chime.
"I'd like to see you."
This is our morning: eggs in a diner,
coffee from a heavyset woman named Ira.
We are twenty-three and alive,
and you have a surprise.

alight

I take glucosamine chondroitin
out of a pill box every morning
and hold it between my teeth before
I swallow,
even though I can't spell it when you ask me.

Because my father told me
he had rheumatism
and his father had rheumatism --
open the tomb in Egypt
and a generation dies: I felt like
all of my future was slowly warping
like wood in early winter rain.

You told me when the stairs got too steep,
you would build me a ramp
and when my hands were cold you would wrap them,
and I wished you had said "in mine".

You Tell Me

I have begun to pray to those ancient gods,
slipping my hands together
and pressing until the tips are white.
I ask for small things amid the large;

that I may make this light,
the rain will hold,
we will wake again tomorrow.

I ignore their preferences and perhaps
that is why they never answer.
(what is there to say?)

Press B to Run

there's this rare solid moment caught somewhere
between when you exhale and your lips
nudge outward, reaching for molecules,
when i swear i can hear space talking in disyllabic beats.

motion
like time
and breath
and thought
cannot
be stopped
or ad -
-justed

i stare on into motion and your fingers click
against the warm blue of a gameboy color.
"your move," you say, and i wind your voice into
space, measuring your vowels like stars across the void.
"i want to write your story," a whisper,
"before anyone reserves your rights."

a roof of clouds above a roof of clouds

suddenly aware of the wires wrapped
inside the plastic coiling cord
like a copper stream your mother's words
will wash ashore on the branches
and stay stuck in the telephone line.

i am drowning in undone moments.

"how can i help" i say
"HOW can i help"
"how can I help"
"how can i

help

missing person: how can you help?
a telephone number
volunteer

Shock

My lungs acquired my heart
before it turned to ice.
Why didn't I spend more time
thinking about him or talking to him?
Could I have done something to prevent it?
If only I had...

I felt stiff, like it was a dream
and I lay awake before the paralysis
wore off. My chest hurt
like some truck compressed it.
My head reeled with why?
How could I have helped avoid this?

Loss, pain,they came in second place.
That came after I could breathe,
once my lungs started working again.
A car, unable to start, but still working
towards some useless goal,
I couldn't actually function.
Instead I ground away, flooding my
eyes, throat, and nose with snot and tears.

Why wasn't I around more?
What could I have done to help?
Was this some joke?

Did you know him well?

I curl myself inward along the cool wall
of your bedroom, dark from last night
and the night before. There are repetitions
here, where I sank my teeth into sadness.

How do you know when they are gone?

When I was seven and fell
from the apple tree in your back yard
I felt the clutching loss of my spine
through my throat, that sudden yank.

Too many years later and my spine
is somewhere in the dirt, congealing
into worms and marrow. Maybe it will grow
a tree from which I can climb toward --

Overhead the skylight looms
and I remind myself to breathe in
and out. Close my eyes against it
because I don't deserve to look up
at stars born billions of years
before my heart.

You and Your, Me and Mine

Something about Summer and the way
your hand pressed hot against my nape,
lips close to the curve of ear and whisper,
that exhale like two moments colliding.
"let's go" a beat into the cicada light,
the hazy agreement lining my teeth
and throat as we manouvered through bodies
of water and laughter [we are a moment,
you said, a minute between time and aether].
The sudden way your fingers bleached
against mine, fine bones grating into black
or the absence of. Standing reeds sliding
between the slip of heels in the wet -
I don't recall where I left my shoes,
just the soggy slap of sole hitting mirror
and you pressed against the shore.

Thrush

Rough as the top of a tongue --
thick and heavy with heat and sleep and slick
as the mud between trodden reeds

I was walking.

Like cicadas pressed against trees,
cracking strips of bark with their outlines --
loud like the crackling of our hands held together
and boots kicking up water from old rains.

This was water from rain that had known you
and marked you -- it told me in splatters it had.

And the world was drenched in shadows
that were deepest when I imagined you
in thickets

I was walking.

on the bank

do you think we sink or swim?
nails bitten to blood, the hum
of two hearts becoming synch,
do you think we are hollow
and buoyant or the solid mass
our mothers must believe we are,
sans breath and bite?

i said
will we sink
or swim?

hail mary

if a phone rings and no one is there to answer,
does it make a sound at all?
i knelt alone at the altar of the third saint
and abandoned space and time to recycle bits of your teeth
as they made sentences atop a building.
it is night and you say
the difference between breath and choking
is the will to expand.
you invite me to dance on the guard rail, and i imagine
holding your hands so tightly as our feet tumble along
like marbles in a wine glass.

you had a knife, friend,
and i often wonder why
i can't find it.

what tonight i dreamt

tomorrow i wake up
tomorrow i wake up
tomorrow i wake up and

everything is different,
your face floating inches from mine,
and it is a /good/ morning.

the change from voided vaccuum,
empty space calling out to empty space
in the whites of my eyes,

to little purple daisy following the sun
into an arc and closing up again,
somehow full and remembered.

tonight i dreamt you were here with me
and everything was okay.

lists of lists of candies

i can count on one-half hand how many enemies i have;
there's myself, the mirror, and half of what i think is god.
i can chew on the same piece of gum for seven hours and
forty-nine minutes, but after i remember what i'm doing,
all the flavor is gone and i'm left wondering why i even opened it at all.

today the wind, yes
today the wind blew so soft
like falling piano keys in a wishing well;
it sang so sadly where i sat,
tucked between two hills where the breeze falls cold.
that's where we let you rest -
in a bed in the dark surrounded by hills.
hopefully the crossbreeze
will keep the nape of your neck
from sweating
at night.

Presence

You meet me,
in the dark you come
and call my name in your way,
the only way i’ve ever dreamt of
being called

if only,

if only is the word that repeats itself in my mind as I sit

as you speak to me.

You form yourself from the dust of the ground, through the clouds in the sky,
at midnight
i see you there in the darkness reaching for you only to see you fade,
fade into the dust you really are.

Why?

How?

I question your absence, I question my existence. I question it all.

if only.