Young Writers Society

april 25

columbine, columbine



--

egg hunting

eggs: warm
and smooth as bedpans.

straw bristles brooms, musty –
the hens slightly alarmed

and cooing their avian
vowels.

we steal among them
at dawn, warming our hands

under their broods –
the sun splits the horizon open

like a peapod and
we stumble out.

april 26

southern gothic

into the alabama lowlands where the heat
seizes like an engine and the byway poppies
resuscitate mouth-to-mouth, gasping, revived slowly
by smelling-salt honeybees, like corseted ladies
having fainted from the heat. our shirts stick to our skin,
and we peel them off down by the swimmingholes
where the waterside tree roots are collarbones and the bullfrogs
are fat and steaming like teakettles.

water slick and muddied, our feet slipping on pondstones
smooth as southern syllables. the swimminghole is full of
skinny-dippers, I tip my head back and float on my back,
the old bayou trees leaning in from scoliosis, bearded
primordial ancestors holding council, the cicadas joybuzzing,
and the mute, fundamental lilies watching us on the banks,
yellowing, touched too often, like old piano keys. sunlight
flutes in.

we gather up our clothes and walk back down the logging road
in our underclothes – we won't be dry until duskfall. the wind is
humid and tacky, our skin feeling like licked postage stamps,
and the birch trees mumble a dry cornpone as we pass. it is a sunday
afternoon, and we can hear the churchbells in town drowsing out
handel's water music and see the negroes coming down the
road in their sunday dress – les griots in the wavering tallgrass,
their oboe voices deep and praising.

cutting through old man sumpter's cornfield, the day
stored in silo shadows, the last few standing cornstalks
whisper to themselves and sway, like preachers practicing
their sabbath sermons. it is at that time of day where
everything naps, and we feel compelled to walk on tip
toe, silent, hearing our own heartbeats sticky and dark
as pale plums.

montgomery sinks – I
am proud of my summer feet,
and the clouds are beaten and dixieless;
a gray, southblown confederacy.

april 27

portrait of the marquis de sade in his garden

you split them open –
dissected until they are most revealed
and all of the secrets have been removed,
like peaches depitted. you tug the petals
off of the daisy the same way a lover
plucks at the blouse buttons of his inamorata.

nightgowns of hull and husk coming off
with the slightest gesture, you place the bulbs
in the earth, in the nobbed beds of dirt, their
roots pedigreeing like a family history, their
complexions rosy as newborns slapped
into breathing. earthworms crawl aortas, and
your hands are white, nervous, but having
been here before.

the poppies you planted two weeks ago prostitute
themselves, red-light district of pistillate and stamen.
you press them to your nose, one by one. it is dawn
and they have just awoken, so they smell of pigalle place
and gin-soured morning breath. the bees nuzzle –
runts searching for nipple.

you trowel the earth – it bends to you. it folds
uncomplaining under your hands. something
speaks beneath it – the thinnest stem of a pulse,
as if asking to be treated gently, and
your blossoms stir like candleflames. the cows
moan in the fields, the milkweed burns a yellow
pastoral malaria. you sit up on your knees and wipe the sweat
out of your eyes, dirt in your palms, salt seeking salt –

the tomatoes that you never bothered to pick
rot in their slums,
and flies gather for the fourth plague.

april 28

congo

I.)

you are too young to have these wrinkles –
I trace estuaries of your skin, the crowsfooted
eyes, the lines of latitude and longitude in which
each mother's worry is carved. you smooth at your
skin self-consciously, as a girl smooths her best
sabbath dress. you tug at the sleeves,
pouches, skirts of dermis as it sags off of your bones
like the plush of a boiled peach. dark mother,
I have often watched you weep in secret, pressing the
heirloom congo to your chest. waterless, your lips crack –
you taste the sun as a wafer of sacrament, and
cast the stars loosely, mumbling, like oracular bones.

II.)

and then the missionaries come, fragile as the first words
spoken by an infant. their flesh generous, their skin pink,
stuttering under the heat. flowers kindled like grassfires,
impala lilies crouching on stemmed cerebellums, and the lucky beanplants
bursting like unmilked cows. baptists, catholics, methodists
planting foreign seeds that wash away in when the congo river
floods, swollen and carrying away the nightly hamlet dreams.

thunder on the horizon, clouds black and loud, like
southern mammies. grass-snake lightning caught and struggling,
pinned by the head, and the caravans of rain sluicing, bruising. roads
run red and vital through the rainforest, like the droplets of blood from
christ's crown of thorns.

your children hide in your skirts. you speak in their ears
as mildly as conched sea-noise, you tell them – this, too, shall pass,
and they drowse on your lap.

III.)

what a collection of bones you have amassed,
like a drawerful of teaspoons! you could name
who each one came from, and how each one holds a particular
memory – ossified windchime, they flutter from your windowsill,
knock-kneed and rattling.

at night, the moths are thin and trembling as marriage promises,
attracted to your light, the light you hide beneath your skirts
of rain, as you rock in your rockingchair, as you knit your stories,
as the songs are put away for the night..

mancala stars, pocketed in the east, overwatching
as your children gather tall and tribal
in the scrublands as poppies.

the sunset scalps the mountains, the bridal glaciers
creep to the north. your light grows,
but you stifle it, hide it, like a family secret.


Note: For heaven's sake, one of these days I want to write something that cracks through my impenetrable shell of mundaneness and self-inflicted insincerity. It's there! I know it's there! I just can't be half-way honest to a poem in order to give it some bloody life!

Note: For heaven's sake, one of these days I want to write something that cracks through my impenetrable shell of mundaneness and self-inflicted insincerity. It's there! I know it's there! I just can't be half-way honest to a poem in order to give it some bloody life!

I do not understand. What do you think is 'mundane' - the poems (which are, by all means, extraordinary, fantastical, magical, mind-blowingly, overwhelmigly creative, as I've already said) or this very sameness of the poems; the fact that they are all like that? The poems are overflowing with life; perhaps this is the issue? PM about the sincerity thing. I'd love to know what you're on about.

southern gothic

It's really hard to tell if the intended effect is going overboard, or if that's just the style matching the content. The first stanza is incredibly bloated with heat - not necessarily a bad thing - and there were some great images (as usual!): 'byway poppies / resuscitate mouth-to-mouth, gasping...we peel them off down by the swimmingholes
...bullfrogs / are fat and steaming like teakettles.' It's strange that the effect here was overwhelming (by the fact that I felt hot just reading it ) but at the same time, it was less powerful, too, since I felt that the heat was getting lost in all the other images. You know what I mean.

water slick and muddied, our feet slipping on pondstones
smooth as southern syllables. the swimminghole is full of
skinny-dippers

Sibilance: makes me think there's snakes near the waterhole too. 'Smooth as southern syllables' didn't work, and for some reason the 'skinny-dippers' ruined the upper-class, slightly-old-fashioned feel (you mention 'corsets' in the S1).

I tip my head back and float on my back,
the old bayou trees leaning in from scoliosis, bearded
primordial ancestors holding council, the cicadas joybuzzing,

I was under the impression that because the first stanza focussed on heat, this next one might cool us down nicely. It left me parched; there was little description here of the water. Words like 'bayou trees, scoliosis, bearded, council, cicadas' felt very dry, exceedingly back-of-the-throat scrape-ish - not at all like that brief respite you hinted at by the 'swimminghole' in S1. And 'like old piano keys/sunlight flutes in' sounded pretty by itself, but also a bit off in the natural context of the poem.

dry until duskfall. the wind is
humid and tacky, our skin feeling like licked postage stamps,
and the birch trees mumble a dry cornpone as we pass

Ouch. It's just so DRY!!! (I mean, if this was totally intended, it worked; but it was a little tortuous to feel so parched and dry the whole time - I do not object to the words, just the images). Even 'licked postage stamps' (brilliant, by the way) sounded scaly and peeled-back. 'Sunday afternoon' was unneeded - it's pretty obvious it's an afternoon, and since it's so lazy, my first guess would have been that day anyway.

churchbells in town drowsing out
handel's water music and see the negroes coming down the
road in their sunday dress – les griots in the wavering tallgrass,
their oboe voices deep and praising.

Again, musical references sounded off. Possibly since it's so languid and lethargic and dry - the flowing tunes are just inconceivable in the climate. Churchbells is too ring-a-ting-ting, water music is likewise Swan-Lake-ish, and oboe voices suggests that they actually have a voice left in the burning heat.

the day
stored in silo shadows, the last few standing cornstalks...............
hearing our own heartbeats sticky and dark
as pale plums.

I have a feeling you enjoy fruity imagery. The above two lines were pretty.

Oh! - just figured out why the other bits were sounding off slightly. The parts about preacher, chruchbell, council, sabbath, sermons, and even confederacy give it an immediately squared-in feeling; like rituals and religious texts and formality and seriousness. But the poem in itself is heavily 'free' in the sense that the actions are wild (jumping in a swimminghole, walking around with little clothes on, languishing in the heat). So the religious bits sort of ruin that freedom.

montgomery sinks – I
am proud of my summer feet,
and the clouds are beaten and dixieless;
a gray, southblown confederacy.

Didn't think much of this - too clinical feeling, I think. 'Montgomery, gray, confederacy' annoyed me, while 'summer feet' was a little too-ordinary and the feeling of 'pride' was unexpected, since we hadn't really seen that in any other part of the poem.

Overall...it was hot. Unbearably hot. And a brief respite would have been nice. Some striking imagery, again.

(Just felt like a separate post, instead of writing a novel on the previous one )

portrait de marquis de sade in his garden

Overall, I was laughing as I read this. Another brilliant way of crushing in that flower-imagery. It's pretty - but less so, since I had seen it before. A first-timer may say otherwise.

you split them open –
dissected until they are most revealed
and all of the secrets have been removed,
like peaches depitted. you tug the petals
off of the daisy the same way a lover
plucks at the blouse buttons of his inamorata.

I didn't find the beginning terribly grabbing. 'Split them open, 'most revealed,' 'secrets have been removed, 'peaches depitted' - do we really need all these images to say the same thing? I liked 'the same way a lover plucks at the blouse buttons of his inamorata,' though.

'Nightgowns of hull and husk' was good, but too much to take in first time round. Good thing I was reading slowly, then . The rest of the stanza was wild and beautiful, but didn't speak to me. I didn't think much of it, and felt nothing by it. I wondered what the purpose was.

the poppies you planted two weeks ago prostitute
themselves, red-light district of pistillate and stamen.
you press them to your nose, one by one. it is dawn
and they have just awoken, so they smell of pigalle place
and gin-soured morning breath. the bees nuzzle –
runts searching for nipple.

This is where things got exciting. 'Poppies...prostitute themselves' was a stroke of genius. I would have liked to have seen this expanded on a bit more. The 'red-light district' was too city-ish, and, when coupled with the scientific 'pistillate, stamen and pigalle,' took away the laughing wildness and cheekiness of the line about prostitute poppies. And 'bees nuzzle/runts searching for nipple' was funny, too.

I loved how you talked about the earth folding and bending - it made it seem more accepting of the gardening, more willing to be changed. 'Blossoms stir like candleflames' was rather empty. 'Cows moan in the fields' was great, and it got to me - I don't know why. The 'milkweed burns a yellow' bit was good until the 'malaria' threw it off on a tangent. And the ending - I like the idea of tomatoes rotting in their slums, but the very last line annoyed me - 'plague,' 'malaria' - ew.

Overall, it lacked an 'overall,' but I think you're aware of that. It described everything in sight, and left nothing to imagination, with a beautiful cascade of words and similes and metaphors, that drowned out any real purpose, a single thread that we could return to and say: 'look here, this was what the poem was about.' I immensely enjoyed the imagination...however, the 'revealing of every secret' in the poem made me too close to what was happening, in effect meaning that I could not step back and ask what really was happening (concentration on all specifics led to distancing from the bigger pic). It looks like this is where the audience-text subjectivity comes in!

Hey Nav, thanks for dropping by.

>> No, the intended effect is never to go purposefully overboard. However, I was definitely trying to convey a feeling of heat and dryness throughout, even in the presence of the waterhole. If you got that, I'm glad.

The parts about preacher, chruchbell, council, sabbath, sermons, and even confederacy give it an immediately squared-in feeling; like rituals and religious texts and formality and seriousness. But the poem in itself is heavily 'free' in the sense that the actions are wild (jumping in a swimminghole, walking around with little clothes on, languishing in the heat). So the religious bits sort of ruin that freedom.

See, that's what I was kind of getting at. Here they are amid such stifling tradition -- they are thirsty, dry, sucked of life. I was trying to contrast the quiet freedom of these two youth and the religious monasticism of the deep south.

>> Do you know anything about the Marquis De Sade? If not, look him up. You may find it interesting. I find it interesting that you found the imagery "pretty", because I was definitely going for a sexual, nearly pornographic description of the plants. The poem actually means quite a lot -- at least to me. It is a poem about restraint, about exhibiting your dark impulses through other outlet. In this case, I am fictionalizing Sade, who, instead of sexually torturing people, sexualized flowers. The rotten-ness at the end is supposed to add to the darkness of this poem, and symbolize the rotten-ness of the Marquis.

Anyway, thanks for your comments!

-Kylan

Your frustration is unwarranted, Kylan - these are great. I recently finished The Poisonwood Bible, so "congo" was particularly relevant to me. I enjoyed the first stanza the most. Thinking of a face having longitude and latitude and estuaries, and particularly a mother's face (Mother Earth?) was really intriguing. "congo" was great. Be proud of that one.

So. I rethought that second to latest one.

It's interesting that you say you were going for a sexualised view in the portrait of marquis de sade in his garden, since there is little that suggests this, which is why I thought it was pretty. A more sudden, more confrontational expression of this is in order, I think.

For example:

you split them open –
dissected until they are most revealed
and all of the secrets have been removed,
like peaches depitted. you tug the petals
off of the daisy the same way a lover
plucks at the blouse buttons of his inamorata.

Read this like you would for the first time. It's actually relatively innocent - it sounds fascinating, the way he's handling the flowers - 'tug the petals' is cute, 'lover plucks at the blouse buttons' might be almost-there, but in the context of the rest, it's a rather beautiful description as well. 'Dissected, split, depitted' don't actually evoke that sexual imagery at all since they seem to fit well with the flower imagery anyway.

nightgowns of hull and husk coming off
with the slightest gesture, you place the bulbs
in the earth, in the nobbed beds of dirt, their
roots pedigreeing like a family history, their
complexions rosy as newborns slapped
into breathing. earthworms crawl aortas, and
your hands are white, nervous, but having
been here before.

I liked the nightgowns bit - but in no way did I think it anything more than a sweet way to say the same thing. I'm getting a sense of 'darkness' as I read this ('secrets...nightgowns...beds...'), but it's a really innocent darkness all the same - a pretty flowery one (external vs internal). No freaky flower-torture going on. It probably needs more graphic, more explicit words. The whole 'roots, pedigree, family history, newborns' just creates a 'generation' of flower-breeding image. 'Newborns slapped, earthworms crawl aortas, white hands' were not integrated well enough into the stanza for me to actually pay attention to them first time; seemed tacked on the end. Yes, that's what I think the poem needed - better integration throughout of the theme as a whole, instead of trying to introduce us to bits one by one.

The third stanza is where it got a little more obvious. But that idea of poppies prostituting themselves should have been subtly introduced in throughout the rest of it, instead of striking us as the only possibly interesting line up until that point. There is a real conflict of motifs going on - there is pretty flowers, some dodgy darker words that we ignore (earthworms, aortas), weird flowers (poppies), and the concept of family (motherhood, newborns, nipple, pedigree...). The last motif seems off, as does the first. Stick to expanding on the two in the middle.

you trowel the earth – it bends to you. it folds
uncomplaining under your hands. something
speaks beneath it – the thinnest stem of a pulse,
as if asking to be treated gently, and
your blossoms stir like candleflames. the cows
moan in the fields, the milkweed burns a yellow
pastoral malaria. you sit up on your knees and wipe the sweat
out of your eyes, dirt in your palms, salt seeking salt –

Again, the first bolded bit is actually so innocent that it fitted in well with the rest of the poem. It seems like the flowers really like the Marquis de Sade - they bend to him; sounds pretty passive. Again, the moaning cows, pastoral malaria, sweat, dirt, salt (too overdone in one go, I think) was not integrated well-enough into the rest of the poem for us to actually pay much attention to it. So I skimmed over it. And, in the context of the mostly-nice imagery, even sweat and dirt just seem like the product of man's hard work caring for the flowers as opposed to anything else.

I didn't feel like the Marquis was made rotten enough here and nor were the flowers 'almost-pornographic'. Of course, I like the imagery as it is, but in relation to your intended effect, the parts that contribute to your theme are rather disjointed with the rest. So much so, that I'd ignore them while reading since they don't add to the pre-conceived idea I have from the beginning. So - it needs to be in there throughout. Experimenting with the idea of restraint and darker impulses sounds great, but it would have been nice if that was clearer.

april 29

garage sale

saturday afternoon, and the teaset that you claimed
for the longest time came straight from the finest china-painters
of beijing is being sold for twenty-five cents a piece, a pygmy
tribe of porcelain, dainty litmus of flowers painted along
their chipped rims, shrugging and chirping as they are stacked
along with their accompanying saucers into a cardboard box. now all that is left
on the table of dishes for sale is a punchbowl and a patient set
of measuring cups, missing the ¾ cup.

the old sweaters and cardigans of grandpa's that you kept lie in a heap,
still smelling of him, smelling of chewing tobacco and cologne
and manure that he could never wash out of his hands
after growing up on a cow farm. I remember him taking us
to the dairy farms in tilamook, to watch the cows graze among
the pow-wows of bluebells, delicate and milky as baby giggles,
undertowed udders swinging, somehow improper
and hilarious.

and the seeds you kept, always planning on planting a summer
garden filled with squash curling and sunning like farm cats, tomatoes
shy behind their hand-fans of leaves, and rows and rows of
good midwestern cornstalks, tasseled like surries, their earfuls
of corn leaning in, grinning dentistry of kernels. the seeds unplanted,
still in their rattly packets that I display on the front table, packets
of dreams labeled peas, carrots, green beans, a dime each.
the afternoon wears on, and the dimes in the cashbox
prattle in their friendly roosevelt slang.

a woman asks – how much for the dolls, but she is really asking
how much I want for my girlhood, the girlhood you kept
in your sewing room, gathering dust. tiny-nosed dolls,
their dresses faded, colorless, regimented in silence like
suffragettes. their china skin is cold to the touch, dry, cracking
like adolescent voices. I bite my lip, think it over. I price each
a dollar, and I feel like judas iscariot asking for his
thirty pieces of silver.

I sit here, auctioning off pieces of you, pieces of your household,
wondering if I could somehow keep it all, and the first autumn-sent
geese jostle south overhead, honking operetta, taking you with them
to where it will be warm and the poppies will always be in bloom,
cupped and straining like ear trumpets.

april 30

gerta

she lives in wisps, her hair tufted
and white, like cotton boles picked for seeds.
wearing her blue housedress, her hands resting
alert and trembling in her lap, like nest-fallen
hatchlings, she licks her lips, as she always does
before beginning a story. outside, it is april, and there
is a diaspora of piglet blossoms, flirting their underthings,
flu of petals.

she tells me that the things she missed most
were flowers and music – shubert and chopin especially,
she missed the tea-party gossip between viola
and violin, the attic notes of the cello, thinly steepled
clarinets. there, it seemed, all the iron-booted hills had to offer
was snow and silence – deep chapels of silence, words struck
like wet matches.

train in the snow, zippered tracks. when they brought you in
you would lay on the straw-strewn floor of the train car
and listen to the spoon-snap of each wheel-turn,
counting, as a hundred human hearts despaired,
and you could smell the fear on their shirt collars,
like the leftover perfume of an illicit rendezvous.

bloodprints in the snow, curled to match the insole
of each foot, the satellite toe prints, like jupiter moons,
the barbed wire on the fences twisting pinky promises
and the dull, mumbling sun passing through the haze of ashes
and soot. it was not so terrifying until you saw the others –
their eyes goggling, their jars of ribs, skin worn
like loose pajamas. witch-men, hobbling, they would stare right
through you, and that is when you lost hope. the only music was
that of worms gnawing columns in the dead coral of their weeviled
bones

you put your hand on mine and you tell me that this is why
you hate the silence – the radio plushes like a peach, and
the nine clocks in the house chime the noontime irregularly
for the next seven minutes. you run your fingers through
the vase of roses, searching for aphids, and

i marvel at how you smile at me
over the clenched tourniquet of petals.