Young Writers Society

9. built in a day

Caliph, corinthian
lights stretch on
your temple, barring
posie-pocked eyelids,
pyrotechnic farsights.

Dreams of flight
and falling, from wax
wings and mezzanines
to elevatored underworlds,
where you cross the river
to kneel before the heart of
spring.

In a letter to yourself,
you describe an Amelia Earhart,
like a shoelast for leather
you are unable to obtain.
But there is no helping
your heel, five pads thick,
nailed into your sole,
a reminder to consider
the physics involved.

10. Canopy

From this height,
the fallacy of
midnight is
sundialed
away with
binary
bonobos.

Decapitalise Built in a Day in its entirety, and it will be brilliant.

11. Progressive

Cabaret to Sputnik,
we rocket
from your drawers.

In funk-flavored aphrodisia
we plan missions on your thighs,
and we're just rock and rolling
here on out, into 90-day dust storms,
looking to settle in the softest of soils.

But we can't iron
out this necessary flaw,
nestled within purple-pink folds,
like a banana peel with
a purpose.

Our yellowed eyes can't
see the forest for the trees,
and the primates therein, so
we subside into the comfort of
tunnel vision, and a shape that
looks nothing like a heart.

Why haven't I noticed this before?

I know eh, Kamas. I think we just found ourselves another literary genius in the making.

Uraziel, I forgot to mention: Flowers and Folios was also great, as was Sunshine and Blind Studies -- I enjoyed them all, really, but.

I like your mad mixup of technical language with the more delicate, lyric words -- things like vitreous, strata, commission, cistern, checkmark, tiremes, behemoths, transit, peroxide all flung up and whirred around with zephyrs and triolets and smiles and singing -- adds a really lovely touch. Sharpens your personality, gives your voice a discernible tone. I like knowing who I am talking to; I like knowing who is speaking to me in a poem.

Keep it up. Can't wait to see more. I hope to see you more around this site in the future.


Navita

12. Last


Circles of dirt and rainmarks are
fluted shingles on quagmire
pagodas purple with the sun,
the coloration of canvas, like
a birthmark resenting its necessity.

A white t-shirt is absorbent. Dowse
the grime, the crust marring holy water
colors, the long banks of puddlemud
threatening archipelago states.

Once
new-kicked, now
frayed by marathons
on pedal and campus.
Threaded in wet memories
of hoodless walkhomes. Bent
at the rubber, split, the bifurcative
product of points A
and B.

Sometimes,
indoor gymnasium
floors, like altars,
recall the sacrifices,
the feet of martyrs
squeaking a language
all their own.

13. sung in a whisper during the sermon and between deep breaths

( who were we to make golden ladders out of words?
we weren't messiahs or fathers of messiahs. we
were starry and crosseyed, yawning at burning meteors
propped above the great plains. so what if my name was
scratched out in the plastic of prom nights? you were alone
in your imagined studio, and i was passing flyers.
you could have gone through with it. )

( who were we to stand on these alternating squares? they are
black and white like we are black and white. but you hate consistency,
and i hate games. the flatlines on our bell graphs had us
rushing to the curve to look for a spike and dimly,
you spoke of sylvia plath. )

( she was a flower, petals pulled in the privacy of sleepovers.
she learned psalms through the mnemonics of fingers
that would hike up her skirt during church.
she wore black stockings as a precaution and spoke a language of involuntary gasps.
she was a camera, and the camera was a mirror. in it, her face refracted
into a thousand infidelities, all self-imposed. who were we to disguise secrets?
who were we to speak of poetry when
you had none
and i had too much? )

( and yet you traveled like a note from desk to desk, until
you settled under the farsightedness of phallic skyscrapers.
before, the fire escapes and catwalks were envelopes, and
i would tuck songs into them. who am i to sing to you? who
am i to receive letters, signed in lipstick like a solicitation?
who am i to keep what you wrote in a shoebox like
a deceased pet, like struck matches, like
dead stars watching over a waltzing planet? )

the poet's obligation by pablo neruda wrote: And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

14. neurosis neurosis neurosis

The process of


coping is a bullet

magazine containing
expletives, fed to

artillery under
the hum of tone

-deaf tangents.
The process, like
all processes, involves

the application of
a nail to the bone


in the temple,
the pristine hallelujahs
of power machinery.


You do not want to
see his profile

stretched
taut against the backdrop
of sliding doors, like

a sliver
of
torn
muscle.
You do not want him

to turn, the promise
of repercussion
in his milky
doe's eyes.

15. Letters to California #1

Back from
a thousand colored pulsars,
the oscillating neon of downtown, to
return to granule, a baja bacterium in
the collective fauna of new world beaches.

Back to half hills, peeled quarries,
and roads like world serpents, infinitely
tongue-to-tail. Back to the compulsive sun of
enclosed villas, and subterranean hearts like
prematured tubers. To the permanence
of churches, primeval sun, rain like
the stifled laughter of ghosts.

With shovel and sunblock,
I return to all that glitters.

16. Yamanaka

Alice would say, the
doves, bothered, can't
be their flightiness,
distractions, noisy.
Olive branches brought
to the other side,
a banner they held up;
the valley, they are away,
gone and hurt, she would say.
She signed, she used to,
deaf to my words, told me how,
told me she folded paper
doves, in the past, but
to what end, to what
use. The intended
message, lost in transit,
can only go so far,
she would say.

17. poem about bikes

I made use of
old words: hub,
pedal, spokes
& radial symmetry.

Phrases like:
Cantilever,
paint residue,
lighter fluid on
a track fork.

Wheels & cards make
for vintage acoustics, like
the slapping murmur of
flip-flops on rubber rims,
or a million snare drums.

White chalk chasers high-
five horizontal shadows
from two feet above the ground
& catch the breeze before
chains can catch
grease.

there was moon netted in the ivy

18. fish in the sea

fishing with
my father: the net in my hands was
argyle for the shallow where bubble-eyed
crabs danced, and they were like high school girls,
their hesitant hands just looking for
something to hold on to. in the evening,
we caught a shy group under moonlight,
puberty giving them prom date prominence,
and they still danced, as if to a slow song.
in the heat of the night
they blushed red, and
we spread their legs
on the dinner table.
but

i no longer fish with my father.

19. Halogen

I went hunting in the back
groves for turtles like paper

weights mountain folding grass
leaves, but I only found loose apples

rolling into nod country, east of
the tire swing. We had to muffle

the day with dry egg salad
sandwiches, and an incongruent

sun, ready to break into
numbers signifying light.

20. Grass Generation

I echoed
convoluted
discussions
in the form
of green
leaf
prints,
the sum of
April.