Young Writers Society

Gradual is gone.

It is fresh snow on the ground
and the March dogwood doesn't just bloom
the way it used to: a kind of slow dance
and trance through the course of a week-
No.
Fruits of white petals are bursting now
like bombs,
here today when they were bare yesterday
and preaching a kind of paradox--
weren't you frost on a leaf in morning dew?
Will the snow melt in warming,
or the blooms shatter frozen by afternoon?

so stark is the air in pollen intermixed in snow,
what a war, what an end of day, what a hello-

here comes the world, relentless!

Breath.

I wake to breath. Drift to breath.
Fall to my knees and grieve to breath.
But in the water, I am a diver
holding on to a thread of breath
and the sea skirts bursting with spray
and glistening foam. I plunge
away at breath with each
flipper-stroke pumping under
cold weight, fighting towards
less of myself- less of breath-
holding on to that gathering darkness
and let me preserve what's left
slow, lolling strides and urge,
urge, urge, urge to be alive, to
fight, I can be kicks
and splashes and elbows and breath
wild wet smiles and breath
of the light bending and breaking
and breath fumbling, feebling
crashing through surface, hard,
rich, bright Hawaiian summers
and breath
stretched to the horizon.

draft one

A closed book, a closet, a clam shut, self-censorship
I'm a lot of crossed arms squeezing for grips
holding on to these burdens becoming my boundaries


draft two

one in every six Americans
is born to a hospital in California-
but how many of them wear
feathered-stuffed-fedoras in rural Georgia?
[ I don't wear it because it's cool-
I wear it because I think you'd wince and purse
your lips and I get to laugh c: ]

i think it's the psychology-
growing up, just a girl stuffed into crowds,
just a frizzy head among a bevy of
ladies in spin class, reading clubs,
tea parties and youth circles-
the yap-yapping is background noise to you,
and they're ask-asking, and you're
mostly contemplating the meaning of the white
specks beneath unpainted nails
could they resemble clouds, fly away
my dreams, my signposts

you're one of four siblings, then
shipped off a ways to new york public
schooling- what does that do to a girl-
the uptight frenzy bustle of a minute,
subway angst, free-falling side of gamble
I think there's just a million sunny pieces
of me now-look here's one I give to you to hold

that time we played the saxophone-
I remember that moment-
stood atop the table
heaving up asthmatic, brassy gut-songs
I hope you treasure that piece I just gave you.

I am here mostly to nurse and lick the wounds,
contemplate the meaning of these ridges
and whorls on my thumb,
if the girl is not in her thoughts, where is she?
she looks and sees them each spark-spark-
strike-and-ignite inside the head, something
like flamed moths these thoughts
or who then, is the girl if not her body-
don't get me started about the wrinkle
cellulite bagged eyes thigh-butt-pits
and so much love
in that tight squeeze,
love of color
-full of wine,
and cream cheese.

oh love, how i love the way the morning rises-
the way the thoughts fog,
and the body hums away her breaths, rattling
what it is to be living and stirring and
falling out of bed, because

as we've just ventured, she's not in the thoughts
and she's not in the body, and we're still looking

the girl one in a six hundred million on this side
of the atlantic,
closed, clam-shut, self-censorship
and a lot of crossed arms squeezing for grips,
and boundaries, like I'm trying to hold on to this fragile rope-
and afraid there's nobody but me who sees the bottom

so, tell me,
what it would mean
if we were
to let her go

The words are lava
do not be touched-
find some higher ground
when a person says,
you're not good enough
and you're
caught pining after the guilt
and shame you bear upon
a heavy casket, the words
are lava, dear - do not be
touched.

So someone's got a
fire engine motormouth
and a need to spit things
out, and they come out
daggered, broken, even-
the words are lava, dear
do not be touched.
Sometimes you curl up
and you say things to
yourself, but dear-
where you find yourself
lacking is exactly
what enables you to grow,
say it to yourself -
the words are lava dear-
do not be touched

Skin and love and nuture
and the way our fingers steeple,
and the laugh that starts
from the belly up, and the
trunks of an elephant greeting
and the baby paw clasping
and the warmth of embrace
and longing- these I can allow
myself to touch and touch and touch.

flowereater

i gather sweet fresia,
sickles of hollyhocks,
twigs and baby's breath
consume them, burning
incense, growing a mild
floral scent closer
to honeymade flesh:

dews and exfoliants
thin flower petal skin
web spinning veins &
pistils of wheat tresses,
like freshly picked wonderings,
a crescent dream manifests
in it, I'm closer to honeymade flesh

in a sense, a being who
honeyfied its own will
churns its own light from the inside,
and gifts it out.

Watch it: the slow, encasing
way it preserves every moment
it encounters: the way you
say my name, how a glass
feels under rain, lightning storms
in the spring, all of you and life
into me where I spin
these amber-fossils; moments
fermenting impressions
mulled over the years
into dizzying,
moonlight-fizzling
soul-woven, gold pouring
mead of myself inside of tongue-

am the bee, am the man, am the all is
(full circle drunk, and turning into) one.

FOMO Her Downfall; YOLO His Demise


Brother and sister, total opposites
come upon their differences
expressing in them, mutual envy,
sometimes cutting with sutures,
precise, methodical incisions
of one another's livelihood.

Come, let's predict their future!

He is the wild one child
navy-bound, jumping off cliffs,
louder than the room he's in,
master to the present moment
friend-of-the-world, sort of man-
but missing the kind of careful
observation that were to prevent
his own demise from reckless abandon.

She is the shy one who sighs,
profound in her own head
alone in ideas, quiet and poetic
ruminator of all that has past,
visionary-dreamer, sort of believer
but missing the life that slips
beneath her very nose, a long
slow, meaningless existence.

And twice, reunited, does one learn
from the one?
Being human,
sworn to their boxes,
their all-respected Houses
turn their nose up with digust in
the face of fear and all things other.

To Keep with NaPo Traditions, Sometimes Things are Just Shit and You'll Have to Come to Accept that Humans Do Shit Sometimes But I Think It's Beautiful In A Way We Will All End Up in A Hole Someplace, Eventually...Unless We're Burned, Like This Poem Will Be Burned

I find myself with a free moment sitting bare upon a toilet. No rhyme or reason here, I'm just going to let what comes out to come out. Mostly, I am impressed with little babies waddling after the older boys. Anyway, the dignity the little porridge-cup holds herself- not even two feet tall, but in her own mind, she's the world to herself. My little potato, coo-monster. I go: who's there? She goes, cyoo, cyyoo! Then there is me, approaching thirty, no longer that kind of people-conscious, but still kind of a little bit tired from time to time. We get old, we look for what it is that keeps us on. Sometimes coffee, or matinees, most of the time just a little something that will bring with it an extra push. The way I push the little dolly on her swingset and she melts into the sky. Drug addicts look for drugs, food addicts look for sugar, sex addicts look for sex, just that little extra push. Workaholics look for corporate ladders, the attention-adled for fame, thrill-seekers for that next adrenaline-producing stunt, we all need just that little extra push. Poetry does it sometimes the way it pushes the boring out from beneath the language. Religion does it sometimes the way it pushes the spiritual out from mind and body. We all seek what it is that pushes, we all came to exist from our mothers' pushes. And me, today too, pushing out words that fail to arrange themselves in pretty stanzas, pushing out thoughts that fail to stir any feelings and perhaps all of this is just a way of my brain expressing its need for a little laxative. That kind of real laxative or metaphorical life laxative. Because I cannot decipher which, I leave the door open

Wow, so! A quick update...

I have been in Asheville for the past week and I am still here until April 24th evening, mostly on the go, enjoying mountains and thunderstorms and the wonderful blue ridge country. I don't really have a laptop or good phone connection most of the time. Today I am in and out of lucidity, my eyes are dry, the conditions outside is darker then I've seen in a long long time- my city at home has so much light pollution, even our nights are light compared to the darkness of overlooming earth, thick black clouds and not a civilization surround you. When I come here, I feel blind. Here are some poems I typed holding the past week in mind, in this dark, with my thumbs, unedited, no corrections, no thesaurus, no google references, no looking back. Just bad, just thumbs.


Wild rabbits, wide eyed
no bigger than my palm
wedged out of the crab-grass
knolls of earth. He shows us what rush!
the luck of the seconds we had, our eyes met,
and he shoots off gone in a thrush.
It's Wednesday
And I know why the daylight lingers
in the squeezes and bare gaps
dancing before the lake
thriving with herons, waxwings
morning doves and swallowtails in lovesongs
silver in the water, and vibrant in the trees as they
whittle its branches, wisps of
smoke in the distance of rain and burned honey-
my rabbit, quiet as a gnome pops his head up
in some kind of twisted game of shared luck
and this time, it is me sprinting,
reaching out my arms in surrender for his day.

Man's Folly

People who love driving-
I could never puzzle them.
But here in their country I see their love
stark against my disdain.

Most of me is in the metropolitans
cities of four million, eight million, ten million,
or more and steel crash against steel
noise and bad drivers, and drivers who
can't see the road in front of them and
Firsthand, see the toll of modernity in distraction
and freshly paved parking lots making
more money than bookstores, and waste
of the sole driver in an SUV on his morning
commute to landfills and chase scenes of criminals,
Deadly traffic bar backsore and tarsmoke.

But you love cars on these bare, empty
two laned country roads. On these winding
hills and greenery and picturesque sunsets
On these landscapes flushed with feeling
in your radios, you love cars that thrum
in the energy of the land, that opens up as
the key turns and you know no mere human was
meant to venture here, and the power and its
freedom and your the sole, man inheritor of the earth
at once opened up to you for thousands upon
thousands of many worlds and miles in front of you.


And you can see how our ancestors came to such
a parkway and said to themselves something like,

We must give the gift of cars to everyone!
As so they built this country

And how the everyone has come to suffer for it
man's folly has come to repeat itself again in phones
and virtual worlds and robots, will eventually come to
space and mars-

the billions and billions of self proclaimed gods.

The absence
what has always been there and
I cannot
intimately cross the distance
easily overlooked
long for this knowing
to become consciously known
for the one that is always the same
to reveal herself
empy of content not located in time.


It's a stuck throat
homesickness for a place I've never been

longing for a man
I never knew I never met.

It's a craving for . . .
and ever bringing myself to share . . .

I am not lost,

I've just never been found

grandfather's oldest texts,
the one with the moth holes and dust clouds and yellow pages that feel like pieces of scabs and ink faded to be almost illegible

but I transcribed them as best I could and in those tomes they referred to people as "the dying".
not living. we were called dying beings. those must have been times when people bred intimately with their futures. It is some intense knowing that evolution has bred in us to unknow.

but it dawned on me
seeing a man of 98 in my arms
cradled as a child I said shush to him
I brushed his hair and the next,

to have the dying and the dead in one gentle stroke of the brush against his head and his last breath in my lap

who has made me,
who is dead.

I've been seeing a therapist.
There's a lot of grief tucked inside
the bones, and no wonder they
creak and they ache.

Let me tell you about myself,
is what the therapist gets paid to know

"You don't tell me anything" is the refrain
of many people in my life-from friends to
siblings to mothers and lovers


Let me tell you about myself. There is a heavy weight in surrender. It's not your knowing the answer,
but my digging it out from beneath tangled, messy ravines. I don't know what I am pulling out half the time,
it's finding out that what I hold in my hand, out as an offering to you, is my own kidney, trapped inside its ropes of intenstines and my hand drips bloody and I turn pale and that kind of fear of not knowing what it is I am pulling out...

I am quiet. But I don't like when people say the word quiet. On their lips, synonymous with the word empty, nothing, dunce. Nothing for them to react to, so they assume nothing inside. Quiet does not mean there is no chatter between the eyes. I can sit upon a clearing in the forest, and see the earth is quiet but not notice it spins trillions of miles fast. Not notice the quakes killing millions in Mexico. Quiet before it struck.

Quiet is a heavy duty control of breath.
So practiced, it is like nothing
and holds in it everything.
And when quiet loses itself-
everything spills
and there are earthquakes all across
the expanse of the earth.

Opening up is fearing destruction
that chaotic
loss of control.
Words and sound are free agents-
in your ear they tell a story never meant
to cross my lips. Words gossip and play
tumble and transform but quiet.

Quiet is a dictator.
Quiet likes to listen. See myself in them.
Become what they are showing me.
you know i listen without judgement;
because I've been their worst selves
and their failures and I think I hold on
to their words as they let themselves free
and then trapped into my cage of mind.

They say what they can and empty out stress
and nerves and shadow and I hold on to them
and see myself in the stress and nerves and shadow.

No one can hurt me when I am stress and shadow. These are assembled armour pieces of you that I stole and forged on my own and I can be brave inside of them

Find myself against a cliff and a half idea to fall in its shadow, kind returning to kind.

Alone in the dark country of overlooming earth and no civilizations and thunderstorms cradled against the crest of mountains

There is shadow shadow shadow and I cling to my bones in fetal pain and I begin to tell it something about myself...

Hey Audy!

That picture of where you are looks incredible - I have barely dipped my toes into that kind of real, remote, phone-free wilderness, and I hope you're having a great experience.

The handful of poems you posted this weekend are interesting! I love the picture you paint in Wild rabbits, wide eyed, and the connection between "quiet" people holding in emotions and the "quiet" earth causing earthquakes in I've been seeing a therapist.

I think my favourite of the bunch, though, is Man's Folly. I like the transition into onomatopoeia here:

Most of me is in the metropolitans
cities of four million, eight million, ten million,
or more and steel crash against steel
noise and bad drivers,

and this bit...

But you love cars on these bare, empty
two laned country roads. On these winding
hills and greenery and picturesque sunsets
On these landscapes flushed with feeling
in your radios, you love cars that thrum
in the energy of the land,

...really made me feel that kind of love of driving - and I like the idea of a poem constructed to make the reader feel love for a thing, and then whirl them around with the reminder that maybe giving cars to everyone was a mistake.

I hope you have a chance to write more poems in the remainder of your trip!