Young Writers Society

DAY XVI




simplicity soaked
the sleeves of your Sunday best like
saltwater and canker sores and
knowing God would be
disappointed made you scared,
but not as scared as ma did;
dishsoap stole it away into
quiet breakfast smiles like
white linen socks and you
rolled your sleeves back thinking
it smells like lemon anyways.

simplicity soaked
the sleeves of your Sunday best like
saltwater and canker sores and
knowing God would be
disappointed made you scared,
but not as scared as ma did;
dishsoap stole it away into
quiet breakfast smiles like
white linen socks and you
rolled your sleeves back thinking,
it smells like lemon anyways.

Absolutely. This is perfect! This is ... I wish I had better words to describe it, but it's so tight and real. I love it, Coral!

knee deep in purple sin






we've fallen from scrawling names into
tabletops and skin and cigs used to lay
between our fingers like currency, but
now we have powder in our nose
and bodies in our beds and our world
is hazeglazedazelet'sgetfuckingcrazed
and here is a beat to beat and
a song to sing like sin and there's a filter over my eyes,
judgment in the twist of your
hips as you move up against me--
(do you own me, or do I own you?)

reality is obscene and we careen past
theatres like topsy turvy feet who never learned to walk
and we fall into each other
like an excuse on a day where the vodka
was watered down and our hearts are wanting breaking.

starbucks




Crumpling paper stars in our hands,
we paid our bills and sipped at the lacerations
it burned into our throats, plying, crying,
sighing
out words we could never quite pronounce before
and we kept up all night to see the moon,
to watch the way words degenerated with our
heads on the tables, into sounds and sleepy eyes and
the gentle way you put me to bed still makes
me smile;
your hands are soft even when your eyes
are hard and I wonder how long you've
kept up this pretense, how long you've been this lonely,
and I wonder if you're happy as I fall asleep.

Dig your fingers in:
blood blanches and calcifies
and we wonder where the wine has
gone when the rings age
oaken brown in our glasses
(our hands warm it,
and it boils down our throats)

with veins gone small
we sit and stare at the way the
world works, resting tired chins on tired hands
(knuckles gone bird-wing white like winter):
we think we know, but our hands are too numb to
grasp it. It falls, does not make a sound.

we spool lazy
honey round our fingers
and wish amber in our mouths
like the belly of a bee--
silence in buzzing summers,
fluttering wings keep us up at night
when we know that they should be asleep
(where is the smoke, and where are my
cigarettes?)

tell the evangelists to
cool their fires and lower
their hands; religion
is scarce in my mouth,
god presses nausea to my skin and
I can hear you, preacher almighty:
your words taste dry on my lips
with incredulousness and I laugh
like a devil when you heal
the woman in a wheelchair who walked
in with two whole feet:
I know who broke her ankles.

DAY XVII


the sight of flesh made
me queasy, even without
september humidity or blood
red leaves in my fist,
but pa
liked my hands with a gun and
green on my shoulders,
and we stepped soft, and I liked
this part: I liked
the listening, the animal
in my feet, the way we
to turned into trees and moths and
bears (cubs, but bears all the same).

but when the buck danced cross our
path, I wanted to cry, and my face
was wet when pa shot his side.
His knife cut the stomach like
summer cut spring and I never
wanted those winter bones in my eyes,
I never wanted to know what blood taste
like when it sprayed on my face.

but when I go to sleep
and the owls sing their songs and
it gets so dark that I just want
to huddle up under my blanket
and pretend that it's still light out,
I can feel the shudder of its pulse
against my fingers still, the cry
in my throat and the glare that pa
shot me when I wouldn't shoot my gun.

I hope you never ever ever ever get rid of this thread. Some people go back and erase the poems, I think.. but I really hope you don't, because some of these are way beyond what I expected. Not to say that I had expectations... it's just that I knew your NaPo would be good, and this is even better than I already knew it would be... if that makes sense. My sentences sound odd lately. Anyway. I'm definitely about to fall asleep at my desk, so yeah. Pleasepleaseplease, keep writing.

saturating like sunlight,
frail hands hold a ruler up
to the gold, quantification
balanced on our fingertips

(how much air can my lungs
hold before they burst?
how many notes can I hit before
my voice breaks?
how long can my hands
hold moments like these
before they're scalded and scattered?)

DAY XVIII


arborescence lies under my palms
in dawn psalms:
we tip the bursts of branches
under tentative fingers
and dose ourselves with
a rising sun and crystal spring,
keeping hands close to our
heart.
we pull on the quiet pulse
of bark and we hope
and we hope
and we blind ourselves with faith,
dancing our pulse to match
that under our hands,
and we exhale with the wind.

DAY XIX




even cryptic fingers like these,
splayed across the workings of wood
and attics and old things left to be devoured
by dust cannot keep away the creaks
of cogs and echoes of people you don't know;

the dark is a stranger, but the
light eats away at
the world like a disease.
here, it will not find you.

DAY XX


voices like wicker
and songs like sorrow;
hands fold in melancholy
regret, sympathy for those
without a cross to their chest.
leavening bread ground under
ivory statue teeth like a mother
of Christ, drawing His Son close to her breast
so that she may once again breathe--
do we starve
without pushing gold and frankincense to our stomachs?

DAY XXI



watering
ribcage roses with words
taken back and sputtered from your lips
to the back of your throat
(no more mistakes tonight, okay?)
you look at her tulip lips--
yellow bouquet and yours doesn't match
and you wonder:
maybe the plastic will crinkle
out the spaces in between your words
when you forget to say something
because she forgot to breathe
for you.

DAY XXII




with ink spilled on skin like
oxygen, pearl words rise to the surface from
porcelain teeth saying things
we thought should never be said
(they've lived under our hands
which have pushed them back into
our breast, pulsing, each beat
a rawthroat cry for freedom)
and we sew our lips closed, each stitch a promise to our
mother and our father and the people
we never should have promised,
like gasoline in our lungs and fire
in our throat, and we
choke