Young Writers Society

alphabet spinster, with
needle and thread and syllables collected
like buttons in a bag, she speaks
soft with a voice like thrush in the wind and there is
a pattern to her pattern and no pattern
to follow, but she weaves wicker like summer and spring
and the old harsh winters pa never let her forget, when
she missed the slope of peaches in her hands; the basket is for
autumn, for rulers and red knuckles, learning letters looped
through crude black lines on white paper and milking white
cows with lines to memorize in the pull of her hands--
cold memories, frayed workclothes in snow and bulky pockets full of rocks,
firewood splinters biting at her palms, shift this way and shift
that way and shift into the grate for winter come....
but winter has gone, and rocking chairs whisper with the
brush of gray dresses and old bones, creaking at
the pull of grandchildren and reminscense, and she has
peaches with cream, and she has
memories to eat in the pull of her needle.

dog-eared pages press
thick tongues to flowers,
pressed into acquiescence and
silent fingers tracing words like the elderly people
we forget can hear what we say in the hallways;
our names are on books and we don't like the font
(it's too bulky, too big, too small and too black) and we
read wondering why the checks come when there aren't
any words,
no real words at all, just mumbleweeds and
margins drooping with morphine muscles, and
we sigh at the minds of today.

DAY XXIII

I dun even know.





suffocate the way my chest trembles
in oxygen, fragile with asthmatic
remembrances and a shallow knowledge of breath;
clutch at hands while I shiver away my skin
and forget the way we normally work
and think about how it feels
to be human on a day-to-day basis, when it's really
only fifty percent of the time anyways--
the rest is spent in sleep and blood pouring into
veins too quickly, too loudly,
to godawfully because nothing works the way it's supposed
to in my body;
I'm breaking, I'm breaking, and I
have been, for as long as I can remember.

DAY XXIV




combustion in the ringing
echoes of viscous spring,
like magnolia mornings,
heavy and white with frost and sun;
we have a waxen ten years
to disappear and we
eat up the fire
(but where does the ice go?)

XXV



under soft skin of lilies and quiet water tension, creeping into green veins,
we lie with glassy eyes and exhale psalms
and she uses her hands to tell me she's a seraph, that she likes to sing,
that each time her six-winged breast beats, she can feel
it in her ears.
her hands burn against mine like copper
and I wonder how
they painted her in constantinople, how
they reconciled stealing god
away with a face like that, how all the slaves took to
an angel on the wall, if they remembered their prayers at all,
if they faced her during the call.

I will pass the cemetery gates,
overgrown, humming with petals
too old to hang on to their stems
and memories too old to matter anymore;
my knees rest in mud and ash and things
like prayers that I never liked to say around you.

DAY XXVI




catscratch ideologies
on my collarbones like
scrimshaw; we taxidermy
mythology with glass and quiet rooms
(pliers and glue and broken bones)
and our words
never meant anything because
no one was every around to hear them
(tree falls and bark decays like wine);

empty air collects dusty vowels and churning sounds
like a timewave--
our fervent palms ache with death
and cash for our tongues, soapbox bibles and words
strung along our fingers, composing psalms in the air
for the masses, pulling at their minds like
they're on a line and we just wring in
hands like copper coins and outdated
portraits.
the glass eyes barely fit, and they
look like they're frowning and I sigh.

it's days like these when I can't pray.
God is gone, filling the potholes with rain
and telling little girls that they shouldn't worry,
they'll grow up to be beautiful too--
is it selfish? I want His voice to find me too, under my insecurities
and shaking hands and press a soft finger to my navel, telling me
I made this, and if you remember that, it won't hurt as much.

but I wring cracked ceramic,
breaking, breaking into words that I'm not sure
I fully understand like the signal for my
broken radio is warped
somewhere through my larynx, all the mottled
twists of my throat and it buzzes on my bones,
hooked through clavicles like a trellis and age old vines.

where has my coherence gone?
somewhere in the marks of opening pill bottles when they're
shut too tightly I think,
or in the quiet of days when the windows are shut tight because
fresh air makes me sneeze. sometimes I wonder if He can understand me
through all the static, if my little house shut all
tight in the darkness muffles my little whispers
of erratic religion.

but it's days like these, when the light finds me
through the smallest of spaces in between the slats of my window that I
think about God, wondering if he listens.
and I just can't bring myself to pray, because
I'm not sure that he does.

DAY XXVII


I'm blinded by parhelions and
I brush magma with my tongue,
sun-colored words spoken from
a burnt mouth, and the car burns gasoline
like whiplashed songs from
that small place, right in between the radio stations and you
ask me if I ever want to get married
and I don't know, I don't know--
I'm too young, too scared, too something
I don't know, but I rest
my hand on yours,
hoping you know, and you look away
and find a station where one person talks at a time--
I wonder how he summons so much enthusiasm
for vaccum cleaners and then
mozart conducts and you shift gears, and my
hand is in my lap again, and I
wonder how the sun shines so bright at midnight.

tracing highway lines with scabbed over
fingers we wonder where will went
and we pump gas to the engine like
there's suicide in black lines on black asphalt
and our bodies pulse in remorse code, too
broken to move our mouths:
"let's throw everything away
and live while we die"

"niente"




I never wrote a love song that didn't go wrong but
we can call it freedom when my voice breaks, and we can
call it justice when my hands knot up into fragmented lullabies and violin strings
on my sides; tune through the octave, tremored arpeggios
because my hands are full and only a few fingers will fit, pulled
taut and snapping into halfway house notes,
and they're much too small anyways, ivory as the
elephant keys;
the chorus is unnoticed, minor fawn stepping into
a world of words and strums and thrums, strangers
singing what I've kept to myself, but I don't mind,
not really, the spotlight is on the floor and I am nowhere
to be found because the curtains are velvet and I need something
to keep me warm at night, and my hands are much too rough,
they need some writing, some silence, some syncopation,
and I hide behind the songs,
always finding a way for it to go wrong.

DAY XXVIII








Hebrew and Greek and Latin cross her arms like anemic histories
and her tongue moves in rhythms that you don't know but
there are anthropologies in the curves of her hips and telescopes in
the shape of her shoulders, and Galileo whispers love
to her ears when she watches the planets move, when she wonders how
the world is round, and where the sun goes at night if the earth
is tossing and turning about, wishing that it could dream with the stars,
and she gathers them in a bottle, but

hemlock burns her tongue when she sips too greedily, even though
religion has always intrigued her and the silver of arsenic is sweet enough on her tender teeth--
the Bible taught her letters and verses but she
forgets the prophets like she forgets how to move her
fingers in the morning, when they're caught under the pillow and still
nestled in dreams, anemic and pulsing with constellations;
they write mythologies for the way Orion carries his broad shoulders,
mythologies for all the spots in between stars, because the skies are black, but she
lingers on the missing words kept in place by all the things out of reach, and
she knows that they're there, even when she can't see them.

like lukewarm lips against your skin
when the tap is twisted and broken again and they're
numb and buzzing with hums
while she washes dishes and soothes away the memories
of watermelon picnics and ants that crawled on the blanket
like a marching band;
her fingers are deft, spin ceramic on ceramic and they smell
like apples and lemon and bowls with plastic covering them, and you
smoke inside and you ask her if she's happy
and she smiles and she scrubs and she sings,
and she kisses you with lukewarm lips, and in
between breaths, you smile, tap water mixing with apples in the sink.

DAY XXIV





let's sing into the silence and slip
our hands into a cure;
remember how short forever is, how
little time it takes to twist your fingers
around tangerine peels and we made
raspeberry jam again, cause it's spring,
but the bread is burnt and the wood is scratched
and we wonder how our favorite songs play
when everything is covered in dust.

DAY XXX


superstition stitches loose knees and tired elbows
(because even birds can only migrate so far) but
there is fear of the cold in her shaking hands, and
when her awkward, too-big brow furrows, we know
that she's never understood snow,

but there's a blizzard outside. the pines tremble with
exhilaration, big black bear
pawprints aching in their bark, and she watches the birds
with palms pressed to cold windows, wishing she
can hide, knowing that hibernation is no way to live.