Young Writers Society

Let's see how much religious imagery i can cram into napo this year!

tonight we
sing ourselves
A highway cathedral—

our roads are
paved with the ten of swords, and
we
measure our MPH by
how often we stop for breath. Don’t
think about every accident you’ve seen—sacrificial
roadkill is a better alternative to
whatever it is you have
hidden in the glove compartment.


(sometimes I wish I could turn
the odometer back. All
these miles looked better
On the other
side of my horizon.)

O_O that glove compartment! I MUST KNOW WHAT IS INSIDE!

There is something kind of enchanting about the concept of a highway cathedral. That concept is so delicious :3 I read it as a kind of roadtrip held as this religious embarking to ... well obviously the narrator of this poem is up to no good. THAT GLOVE COMPARTMENT!

i am made
up of
the same
three things.

the first is a lie. nothing is like
anything else. if you can
touch
it,
you can break
it,
and super glue is cheap.

the second thing is lost inside
your second-grade social
studies book (between love letters
not fully grown and a flower
someone told you
would grow up to be a key).

the third was dug
out of a
hole in the
ground in the year
nineteen-forty-six. it
breathed for twelve breaths and
then we put it
back. (there is photographic proof: one
shot, blurred motion. its face
is turned to the side and
only something brought
from the ground will
laugh like that).

sometimes when I wake
up in the night,
after you’ve gone
for water,
i can still taste
dirt in my mouth.

Literally just sat here and whispered a full-of-love "oh my god" at that poem, Sachi. Thanks.

(take a breath,
my heart who
became a bull.
allow moss to
grow over your
rage. absolve your spine
for growing teeth.) (when
you blink and see
stars, you may let
yourself fall. this is the universe
calling you home.)

I saved the
queen of ladybirds
from the bottom of my
talon-fisted bathtub. She
taught me how to read
my fortune on
my body through the water streaks:
ten of freckles,
three of eyelashes,
the birthmark,
the scar—she crawled over
my eyelids and told me about how
the cat ate her favored handmaiden
at three in
the morning when we were
busy connecting constellations out
of the glow-in-the-dark stickers
above my bed. she opened
her wings on my lips—everything
can taste like
summer if you burn
it black enough.

she gives me calamity
like a talisman
—because
nobody has any use for a girl whose
fingernails are cracked and torn from scratching
at her sins
(TheyItch,Mama,And
NothingIDoCanMakeItStop).


my encyclopedic superstition
told me every spot on a
ladybird’s back
meant good luck. but the queen
eats her spots because nothing
fuels a war better than eating
your own heart.

(The scar
the birthmark,
three of eyelashes and
the ten of freckles and there,
at the bottom of the deck, the devil
who lives in the tower, where she builds
it up brick
by acrid summer brick.)

everything is story shaped—
you learned this from the quiet
when it taught you its name, and how
It’s longer than every other secret
you’ve never told. from it you learned
that G-O-D is a three letter lie for
everything else you’ve ever loved and that
The devil has always lived outside the details,
sweeping up the crumbs from underneath
the pulpit. (from her you learned how Venus cast
herself the morning star, became the mourning star, and
that Lucy never goes by her full name.)

the word autobiographical
sings itself to sleep on the chords of “tomorrow will
be better" and the day after that is a weekly prayer
request filled with synonyms for empty
possibilities.
(when mars came down
From his heaven, he told you
the way of the world—it was never
your fault you were raised on blasphemy, and
the secret to everything else is
in how you flick your wrist.)

Aesthetically: a
Knife fight (your smile was
Never the sharpest thing about you. The
Only weapon you
Ever needed was the ability
To convince someone else to bleed). And in
Knowing that “the facts were these”, did it
Ease the pressure of radiance? A maker’s stamp
In fine detail behind
Your knees (because when
you checked your bags at
The door security saw every lover’s
Souvenir you stole for
Yourself was a weapon of
Mass mutilation but
Decided to let it slide). Braid
Your hair up out of
The way of your
Ambition—as conditioners
go it softens like your heart
under my hand but it’s always
a bitch to remove.

Subtly, I could
go mad here, in a
place with potted plants
and a table
set for one.

let’s discuss the
etymology of the
word. i have kept mason
jars in my closet full of every
half murmured sentence you
pressed into my pillow late
at night. you told me it was a
cypher built for clever girls. nobody
warned you my spine was made of
beeswax still crawling from the hive—the
buzzing in my veins is nothing to do with
how you make me feel and
everything to do with the queen bee nesting in
the hollow of my throat.
let’s discuss
the etymology. i have
wrung my pillow out over
the sink. a year’s worth of
whispers won’t even come up to
the overflow. the mason jars hold
gods now—each one named for
a day you stole from me. the jar
holding september twenty-third,
two-thousand-fourteen
knows
my name better than
you ever will. the air inside her
is pinker than any lipstick I could
have worn for you. let’s discuss the
etymology of how good
a closed door feels when
you open it for
the last time.

This
is the bassline to
divinity—stretched behind your
eyelids to pinpoint
the way to the
end of the mark. I need a
tutorial to delete my
cosmic browsing. “languages
to say amen in” will not
be any cheaper than it was
in the beginning of time, where
“I am okay” was the first chapter in
“HOW TO KNIT YOURSELF
INTO A TRAINWRECK”. I’ll be thanked
in the author’s notes as “the one who stared
down the cliff and wondered if
hermes was afraid of heights”. There is no
magic trick, darling. Figure of
speech and slight of
hand fuck in the attic
to become a stilted conversation
held in a gas station bathroom at
five in the morning. Is this where
the world stops making sense? Think
back to where you left your remaining
hallelujah—a word of gothic spires and
city streets. a never-ending paragraph full of
RunOnSentences that will someday
be tattooed on someone’s inner elbow, their own
divinity lost at the bottom of a
hope chest with all those
hair ties and bobby pins you
sacrificed to your household god.
(i am the household god. I am
a never-ending bassline full of
RunOnSentences. i will breathe
a guide on how to delete
the world’s
cosmic browsing history because
hyperventilation is the
only language i remember
how to speak.)

(in the beginning there
was nothing at all and
then there was me.)

I dreamed you into
Existence inside me,
In the cathedral cage between
My bones. bow here at my alter. The
Chambers of my heart will
Carry your prayers to build up
Behind my teeth. They are arrows
Barricading behind all the languages
Man has invented to mutilate. Look
here, daughter—you have drawn the
knight of cups with the king of swords
piercing him to the ground. this is your heart
in your hands when you’re left
unsupervised—only you are capable of
mass murder in the singular sense. Prayers
dripped from your veins when you cut
yourself open on the slab. Flowers grew
themselves into hymnals to fit your
your mouth but everyone else knows
how allergic you are to
pollen and mercy.

(you will sell your soul
to the first devil who
opens your passenger
side car door in order to
make peace with
this holy inferno inside of you
aching for a piece of the
cosmos to care that you are
here and
breathing and
alive.)

Look. I am perpetually
tired. the contents of
the bags under my
eyes have been moved
into closets and dressers and
i’m already beginning to
throw the this-is-still-sort
-of-clean shirts on the top of
my hope chest. i dream of bringing
lovers into this space but
dread laying awake
at two am when i
wake up because the
weight of life unlived
is scratching at the walls again, and i
won’t be able to move in case i
wake up something else
besides whoever is
lying next to me
in the dark. I have
been told to sleep
when I’m dead but look;
all I feel is dead when
I don’t sleep.

(everything is
always terrible until
it isn’t. but i wish I didn’t
have to keep
searching for it in
the mean time.)

The city
will swallow your name. initials
will sink to the bottom of a
river flowing darkly. under brake
lights and cigarette smoke you
will find yourself in the
center of fluorescent pearls. in a
crooked house on a tired street she
will watch you among her roses and
blankets and think to herself ‘reluctantly,
I have fallen in love with a starving thing who
doesn’t know how hard he
bites down’. (but diner coffee and pancakes
never tasted so good, and
when you bring her home she will still
press her hands to your ribs and try
to contain all of your broken
pieces. (this is what it’s like to be
a car crash in the making. This is
what happens when you don’t know what
you want.) you are an inferno that will
burn her alive—she showed you her
favorite painting and the future told her
‘you will reenact this stroke by bloody
stroke, but god always answers
the wrong prayers’.

(you are not
good enough for her. she has never
agreed to be your morality. She will not
drop her name in the river, and the city
will not take her, and
the city will never let you go.)

You haven't brought up cathedrals that much thus far into NaPo! I just wanted to stop by and say that your last poem is so vivid and it's just so You which is a good, good, thing for a poem to be.