Young Writers Society

Gonna run out of words to tell you how amazing you are, but you don't need to hear it, really.

Lion Cub is so perfect. It just breathes so much character into every word, every line -- the whole thing feels so tight because of it. I could elope with this poem.

Texas I also enjoyed. I think this is it -- you are so wonderfully character-focussed, so people-focussed, that we never lose sight of your personality beating loudly through the meshwork of your words, either; it's all there, laid out, glass-clear, in all its intricacy, in all its beautiful ugliness and ugly beauty and straightforwardness.

Endings in general don't grab me as much as the beginnings -- fall too soft, compared to the start, and in poems that short, it seems to me that the whole thing should pack a full punch, rather than ease off on the last lines -- but I love you for the killer openings anyway.

Thanks for the reads.

hey Navita you leave the best comments. I appreciate it.


CROSS-STREETS, STREETS, NOLITA

smog tears gather at the base
of the Rocky Mountain spine,
Denver and glassy eyed
featureless teenagers

their skin smooth
lacking the starmap contours
on the trumpet player's hands
the one at the jazz club where I see
Nolita, remembering and forgetting
to pick up the tab.

we drove
1600 miles to New York
with a pen behind my ear
Nolita drives and pays the tolls
on the Ohio turnpike, counts the longest
Pennsylvania miles.

I've been looking for past selves
on shelves of convenience store snack food,
in the sunglasses that belong to colonels
who fought in brief, microscopic wars
that took place on dust motes

in a sugar spiral of between-spaces
of mirrors and the tain.

REPRESAS

Grace sits in this lawn chair
naked, drinking beer and smoking
cigarettes as the dead growth burns
in a a circle of scowling winter trees
the embers forming unstatic
constellations in the air.

"How long?" she wonders,
"would I have to sit here
before the vines and their flowers
cover me in my chair."

FROM A GREEK RESTAURANT ON MT. VERNON ROAD

Yeah I am out there
in 21st century Iowa
with the corn stalks
and shy August birds,

with the wind that lobotomized the barns
and the serotonin trampolines,
farm cats scratch out
the best beats

like nightclub knights
the ones with glowing palms
that line the yellow Florida shore
high-rises, where my lover's grandmother
threatens to kill me over spilt milk, spilt leavings

I am trapped in a circle of nonchalance
the weight of Luann's head on my shoulder
outweighs the weight of my yearnings.

FAMILIAR MITOCHONDRIA

my dad's sister died,
she died not quite
my dad's sister see,
he didn't really know her
didn't know she existed
till he was 18 see, in California
four generations of gentle discretion
hid just north of Santa Clara where Bry
rows boats and jostles the Christmas ghosts

at the funeral, Dad says him and his brother
my uncle, are getting along. He says it
as though it is unusual, I've got cousins, see
I didn't know I had. Teeth and St. Louis
Kansas City my birthplace stretches out
like urban bears, all paws and former
predatory teeth my hands are cages
full of feathers, my eyes, twin magpies
hinged so my pupils can nibble at the necks
of starry Denver sheepdogs, the ones
that undress their undressings.

Later at the wedding my grandmother leans,
she sips champagne and winks so as to say
you come out of something that comes out
of me

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SELF PORTRAIT AT 21 #3

I wonder aloud at dinner
about whether or not
if i put my butt up to
someone else's butt
could I poop
into their butt
from my butt
and then
they would have
to poop out my poop
from their butt

THE BODIES pt III

Dana doesn't come around no more
she blitzed the oxeye meadow before
the horizon could pitch the sun
over the mountain.

Daisies don't come around no more,
neither do baby foxes, the ones that hid
under the shed at Teresa's estate
by the undressing bodies of pastures
and fields. Sheep, barley, wheat

a skin diary penned by sunlight
and tool handles, sharp rocks
and rose stems. A diary panorama,
written with evergreens and mountain
peaks, Colorado, unity, snowstorms.

In a canyon by I-70, Dana holds
a fluorescent light tube above her head,
and under taut high capacity power lines
it lights and flickers, hums a bar of Sonic Youth,
I don't know their early stuff.

"See?" she says. "We are rats in a maze,
pieces, parcels, and pendants,
subatomic particles in a supercollider."

later at the quantum bar Dana and I,
we meet. We fuse to a singularity that consumes
a bottle of brandy, a box of tissues
and a bouquet of wild oxeye daisies.

Ryan: es posible. I'd actually call it a work of creative nonfiction

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COMBINATION LOCK

I'm done struggling, she says
with her lab coat and her curls

and so then Dom has to roll his eyes
and go to her box and fetch the fuck
mail.

Because how can it be that hard? he tells me later
everyone else can open their locks.

last week she was all pissed because
someone stole the Wii that belonged
so they said

to them. Them being the geeks.

Them being the ones who write fantasy and fan-fic,
anime. Lab coat, struts, emails these things remind me
to be conscious of how entitled
I am acting.