Young Writers Society

April 2: distractions
April 2: who de man who de man who de man who
April 2: I am Confused Between the Sciences
April 2: Neighbors and Flight
April 3: Only the Rats and Me
April 3: A Chapter on Attraction
April 3: conquest
April 3: An Argument after Death
April 3: Red for Mars
April 3: We pretend to sit side by side
April 4: I didn't cry until afterward.
April 4: Calliphora
April 4: studyin's a lonesome sport
April 4: Now I know why old ladies lick their thumbs before turning pages
April 4: Some things never change
April 4: Sisters (written with Pengu)
April 4: Heredity
April 5: lost at shore
April 5: easybake
April 5: dreaming of Jesus
April 5: alveoli
April 5: tri-hi-puh-huh-leh-het
April 6: take out dine in delivery
April 6: I'm Not Sure I Want to Tell You
April 6: a bleak and indefinite future
April 6: this is how i remember her
April 6: Bent Necked
April 7: like popcorn
April 7: wither
April 7: Thank You
April 7: someone else speaks
April 8: Thin Walls
April 8: In the Market Alone
April 8: As Nice as Pie
April 8: then and now
April 8: No, thank you
April 8: and plastic kitchen sets with cheese
April 9: -stick
April 10: insecure
April 10: shellfish
April 10: Cashflow
April 10: Nostalgia
April 11: Mariachi
April 11: peach-ch-ch-ch
April 11: oh, that's right. you all like religious offerings as long as you can post them on facebook.
April 12: walking
April 13: the honey is crystal in the bottom
April 13: the fifteen year old girl sits at a cafe
April 13: there are noises in the hallway
April 13: Broken
April 13: what it's like
April 13: Otto
April 14: markers
April 15: Chivito
April 15: Koza
April 15: lessons in grinding
April 15: Leila
April 16: can't anybody spare
April 17: One Morning
April 18: Dear Thomas,
April 20: Before Bed

April 2: distractions

a.
This should be
prose
instead.
This should be
set
apart
with commas.
This should be torn and twisted until your skin is dry like crumpled paper
the kind you put
in the wastebasket
to cover up what you put there this morning.

b.
This should be
easy.
This should be
smooth
and
sweet.
There are things that make it smooth and you should buy those things
you MUST buy those things
and you should use them and keep them hidden at the back
of your medicine cabinet
behind the Advil and the Hydrogen Peroxide
that you use to clean the stink out of your belly button.

c.
This should be
small.
This should be
petite
and
delicate.
This should be the tiny jasmine blossoms
and you should not look like you know the camera's there when
you lean in to smell the flowers and cup them into your face.
You should look away to a corner, not too far,
just enough that it makes you seem disinterested because that is
what makes you interesting.

d.
This should be poetry.
This should be shouted and cried and
ripped
out.
This should be extracted with snubbed nails that were filed
especially for this day,
especially for this day that should be happy:
the day that should be brimming with coffee when you pour the pot just a little too long,
the kind that you know should be ringed around on the table
but instead it holds on.
It should hold on.

April 2: who de man who de man who de man who

I sneak in the back to avoid the front porch talk
where the crows jump from rocking chair arm to rocking chair arm and sing
“who de man who de man who de man who?”
while that man sits behind her and braids her long long hair.
I know he sits up there
and sips on his sweet water
and braids her long hair
because I saw him and her
and the red and white straw sticking up like a piece of hay from a farmer's mouth
puckered all around like the dirt does when the drought dries up even itself.

It's cool and dark in the back and black and damp,
so I pull my shawl around my shoulders
and shhhht away the goose pimples that march over my skin
in rows of stubborn reaction.
They can't fool me.
They can't scare me.
That porch is hot and beating down in rivulets that never quite reach your chin
'cause the steam springs up into your eyes and makes 'em water.
So even back here it's hot. Even back here it springs back up.

I snuck in the back and walk out the front
like dis de place I been birthed in raised in movin out of
when de sun breaks
through the willow trees
and hangs like a curtain too long closed
to remember what it hid.
I step on the cracker he placed by his knee
but even miles down the road I still feel the crumbs in my shoes.

April 2: I am Confused Between the Sciences

Someday when I am forgotten,
I hope that you will kneel in the dirt
so that your knees part the topsoil and you feel the chill the worm feels,
so the brown clings to the wrinkles where you kneel.
That dirt will have been a part of me that will sink into a part of you.
The way you said it would when I swallowed what you gave me.
The way you said it would when I let you tongue me there.
Thin, twisting things dance beneath the surface in a graveyard,
knotting in my stomach like they do under the engraved fountain:
_______________________“because our mothers told us not to.”
When you brush away the loose dirt,
I can feel it down here, in the bones or at least in the place
between those and my skin where my nerves knot up and rise into tree roots,
all a part of the next time the leaves fall in September.
I will be there; will you?

April 2: Neighbors and Flight

There is a woman who lives
the floor above me who says
that she wishes she would cut off her fat
and hide it underneath her husband's pillow.
She sits near her window,
aware that it silhouettes her,
seeing through my eyes the way she disappears into a shadow.
I don't need to know the facets of the wrinkles of her face
to see the line from her chin down her neck
and the way her hand shakes
when she lifts a small cup to her lips.
She lowers it without drinking.
The butterfly passes over the flower with an upturned, curled up nose
and flies out.

“Do you think he would mind?” she asks me.
“I think he loves you the way you are.”
I turn around to look toward her door.
There's a word for the stained glass rectangle at the top of it,
but the word has hidden itself behind the books with yellowed, chewed up pages.
There are pockmarks in the bookshelves.
There are bite marks in her hair. Torn and tearing, falling, falling.
She tells me that one night she is going to
cut off the fat of her stomach, the fat that bulges out
over the top of her elastic-waisted pants, and place it sweetly,
softly, like the tooth faerie, beneath her husband's pillow
and wait for him to come back to bed.
I turn the door knob and slip away like tea kettle steam.
She hears my footsteps in the hall and steps away from the window.

April 3: Only the Rats and Me

I keep my ears in a box made of glass
but the rats have grown stronger and are gnawing at the corners.
Their tongues flicker out like burnt candle
wicks braided into the baskets that hold rising cobras.
That place is far away, though; bring me back.

The box where I keep my ears is hidden domestically.
It is in the cupboard in the kitchen next to the sugar,
but the rats have grown stronger and need something more substantial.
If I reach in my hand I can feel the whip of their tails against the tiny white hairs
that sometimes look like beams of light under the lamp.
Those are the times I almost think I'm a goddess.
But the rats gnawed holes in the corners and they hiss in at me,
scratching their talons in crosshatch on the glass.

I have been told to rescue the box with my ears
but these days I sit on the kitchen stove and listen.
The rats say cruel, destructive things into the corners of the box
and I know they've taken my sugar, too.
The insults are sweet to my hidden ears
when I have nothing left to eat in my home.

April 3: A Chapter on Attraction

Illustration goes like this:
a jasmine bell looks whiter surrounded by dead fall bushes.
a woman looks uglier next to a child.

Now step back.
The jasmine bell is white on its own.
In a field of snow, it would be its green stem
that would grab your eyes and hold them, crisply.
The woman is ugly on her own.
In a crowd of ugly women, it is her mind
that grabs your heart and bends it down to submission.

Jesus, Hannah. You've gotten good.

April 3: conquest

From the ground I call them mountains.
They seem to swim in the air and to graze the bottom of the sky,
leaving white scratches that spread and flow away in wind.
They curl in around the campus, crowding like girls around a story,
their green hair ribbons stretched out lazily: cats in the breeze.
There are secret paths that lead up their skirts, winding
in between the groves of thin white trees the world has not yet learned to shave.
Their plump-lipped rock knobs tempt me to trace the dirt lines with my fingers
and rub the grit between them. So I go.
I trample like a bejeweled elephant in my clean sneakers and ivory face,
tearing down the trees around me as I pull myself upward,
rushing with leaves falling against my face and leaving tiny paper cuts,
burning through the small, stunted grass that tried to do what I am doing.
I come upon the crest where no more trees rise higher and I am pushing through, then

what?
The top?
Okay.

I peer down into the valley, peek my head out between trees.
The houses look like model ones; it's difficult to believe in life at all
in the face of controlled and constructed stillness and no wind.
Here, there are no whispers. I cannot see the girls as they bend
at their waists and the back of their skirts lift up to show more of their thighs.
From the top of their heads I can only look down at the falls of their hair.

But there is something at the top instead of swelling pride.
There is a path that I can take back down the other side.

April 3: An Argument after Death

I remember that last time I spoke to you, we spoke about summer.
You coughed up a little pollen. I brushed my hand over a sunbeam,
or something like that. Don't you remember that time?

It's hard to see now, stuck in the middle of four sides of stone,
but there was a plot up by my grandparents' cabin where
I planted a row of my favorite orange lilies next to the water pump
with my mother's hands cupped around mine and the lake just down the hill.

To me, more than sunbeams or pollen, that red and white shed
along with the basement where gleaming raccoon eyes looked up the stairs
so I always asked someone older to get the swimming noodles for me,
to me that red and white shed has the smell of summer.

The feeling of dusk, though, is caught between the railings of the porch
where my grandfather sat next to my grandmother on the bench
and watched the darkness bloom up from the nooks of the leaves.

Inside of the cabin, on the dusty faded rugs that were never as warm as outside,
there was a spilling of marbles and a scatter of sticks that I played with
with chubby hands and chubby kid relatives until the grill smelled like dinner.
The fireworks started outside after I couldn't see faces anymore,
but there were those, those ones that lit up the sky so I could have sworn

I could have sworn that under those sparks it was daylight again.

I really like these. Expect something from me before the end of the month.

April 3: Red for Mars

You used to be only seventeen
and now you are nineteen
and okay, listen,
this is really important to me:
even though we never talk anymore and
you probably don't remember why we liked each other in the first place,
because we look back and see ourselves and don't like us anymore,
even though you aren't real,
and I never got to hold your hand
or see the way your eyes line up in front of me
it seems like you stay little forever
and hold on to the moment that I met you
until your finger tips leave dents in the stiff cotton.

But you used to be only seventeen
when I was only eighteen and
you looked out on a cloudy horizon and told me what you saw.
You told me that the shapes dancing there
were the ones I was afraid of
but you kept them in your pocket like wrapped hard-candies:
blue for jupiter and red for mars;
either one I could see through them
and you sucked on them until dawn made them look like empty bottles.
You told me what it felt like
in the moment before, like you'd done it already,
as you brushed your fingertips along the soft,
silk, underbelly of her dress when it hung down
from around her ice and rock ring waists.

Now I am twenty and I have things I have to tell you:
I screamed into my pillow in a place with a grey horizon, too,
and even though the roads were wide and empty,
I felt like there was no where that I could go to be
small enough to fit and be wrapped in your pocket.
I climbed a mountain just to see if I'd feel free there,
but I knew my voice would tumble drop roll all the way
back down to where people would eyes wide and rush
to save someone who just wanted to be alone.
I filled up and drowned in brown water -- the kind we joked about
or at least I thought we did, but you knew better --
I drowned because I wanted to move and they moved but I did not,
did not know how to move at the same pace as they did.

He wouldn't pick up the phone,
and you wouldn't pick up the pieces
of the ivy trellis we constructed together
in a virtual wood shop class
(the kind where we won't cut off our thumbs
but we get deep gashes in our hearts).
I still see our initials in the corner,
behind the brittle dead ivy,
carved in uncertain, questioning, terrified letters.

April 3: We pretend to sit side by side

I twisted a piece of your hair into mine and left it there
until the moon rose and you ripped mine out;
I suppose now we know who was stronger after all.
I press my thumb to stop the bleeding and wait for birdsong.

These are great. You're back with a vengeance. Not sneaking in from the back porch at all -- it's evident that you will take this napo by storm. If anything, I think your recent focus on fiction has given you a unique and new impression on poetry -- the stories, the honesty. There's something about your play with language here, a certain dynamic and elasticity which I wish I had -- the ability to toss around phrases that could be boring, but make them fascinating and lively.

I particularly liked "Chapter on Attraction", as everyone else did. Very simple, but with a aching meaning. There is no metaphor, simile, or complex word-play here. You lay down the facts, and they are beautiful. I also enjoyed "neighbors and flight"...reminds me of this: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19094. Grotesque, sweet, saddening...and yet you manage to do it all rather simply, without the bells and whistles that I am party to, and to which you once were as well. Here's where your fiction comes in -- a lot of magical realism here. I feel like I'm reading Marquez - South America, which is good. I've come to the conclusion that I can't connect to South American poetry, including Pablo Neruda. But you work it in your favor, for sure. Your first two poems have great rhythm. First stanza of "who de man" is really quite catchy. The rhythm manifests itself other-wise in the first...the repetition and the line breaks all add into a nice whole.

Another thing I ought to congratulate you on is your proliferation. I am quite jealous at how you've been popping these out. keep it up!

Kylan

April 4: I didn't cry until afterward.

He made me listen to the voice mail message
instead of telling me himself.
He made me listen to the calm, straight ruler voice
of the aunt that my father painted like the devil
as she told me he'd fallen again.

There was a night I'd woken up
to the flashing red white lights outside my window
even though my window faced away from the street,
and the next morning there was no one to drive me to school.

Now I live too far away for the lights to flash in my window
and instead they get boiled down and stirred, refined into
that crystal hard voice of my aunt saying,
______“your father had another heart attack”
while he sat and watched me as I listened.
I wonder what shadows he saw cross my face
and I wonder if he felt the tangled claws in his gut
when I broke down into my hands
and slipped through the gaps between my fingers
like sand that's been caught in the rug at the bottom of your car
and gets shaken out weeks later
when you've forgotten how cold the beach gets in April.