Secret Stash-Ideas for Writing 9/1/23:

The Summer

and I’m sitting here as Summer has ended

like a laugh fallen quiet

or the closing of a door

I’d like to think I’ll have my back by Winter

so when the snow comes and whisks everyone I’ve come to know home

a lit candle by my bedside a newfound comfort

I’ll be ready to smile again

Exercise # 1: Ideas for Writing:

The Listener

My pain is the biggest admirer of my happiness

most days they fight for dominance

for I’ve laid back and chewed on my cheeks

let my tongue rest in a pool of warm blood

it’s what I’d rather do

than face the odium I’d be seen as

when the time comes for me to talk

instead of listen

Poem #2 (every day poem):

a Diabetic’s Dilemma

a syringe

a prick

blood speckles and splatters onto my testing strip

a defeated sigh laying in wait

I was born again at three when I was diagnosed, common knowledge amongst most who share in a disease bound by wires and plastic

I’ll have to do this four more times today

little stars on my fingers a reminder that this is forever

A Picture is Worth a Trillion Dollar$ Poem:

The Moon

This rugged object roaming her cluttered domain

ducking behind her clouds as if she has forgotten us

I find myself tilting my head, looking for a Goddess that won’t listen

one that hides sheepishly, ignorantly, amongst her skies

her menacing crevices a vague reminder that herself in whole is everything I am not

what odd jealousy and turmoil we’ve come to share in the dead night she illuminates

I want to touch her, to smooth her aches and to mold and press her dents down into my own

with my thumbs she’d be my ball of clay

I’d never close my eyes to people’s prayers as she has

if only she knew what it is to be small

Ideas for Writing # 6:

To J,

I have forever been only as much of you as you have been to me,

so it makes sense to me that my music taste still lingers in your ears

That my crinkled smile is reflected onto your lips

That your tears have trickled in the same way the water by our house had splattered onto the rocks that are your chin

To have a brother is to have lived beside a little flame and I’m glad I could be your match

Though I’d never admit it, what is mine is yours in heart and in body

So do you promise to lay besides me giggling at your camera roll and pinterest

Do you promise to tell me about every boy youll ever like and what you see in them that reminds you of me, so I approve of them

to talk forever as a brother does, as a sister I will forever be here to listen

People have told me before, that when only my name is spoken it’s odd because yours has forever followed mine

There’s a sense of emptiness I’ll forever feel when I left New Jersey and it makes sense to me that my brother’s absence is why,

But maybe he never really left me

Living in Metaphor—Ideas for Writing:

Crossing the Street

I know there are cars coming

Shiny beetles ringing thunder

Slicing through stifling air and reeking of oil

But here I am, feet loosely planted

Eyes fidgeting around the familiar thickness in the air that street drugs and cigarettes bring to Portland

It astounds me that people could call a city home, you’re basically nameless

I can’t help but wish I had a friend beside me

Because If I saw someone I know across this street, the cars wouldn’t matter

They’d beep and screech to a stop

There would be a cacophony of crashes

An orchestra of rage brewing in my wake

To the wind goes all formalities

I wouldnt hesitate to run to my friends immediately

but I think they’d look both ways first

Two free poems:

(1) Mother

Being in this house, unaccustomed to what I had known for eight years straight as I return like a corpse to its tomb

Being in this house, unforgiving and stuck like a bird where the dishes are never done and the mold in the shower puts a hole in the wall

Being in this house, where the wood has been rotted with rain and the carpets have been seeped with childhood dog’s piss

Being in this house, these scenes haunt me when I come back from college, only to find my room has been turned into the dog’s bed, one of my mother’s candy wrappers on the ground from when I last visited this graveyard

Being in this house, where the food has been lain out to spoil like my mother’s body on the couch

Perhaps she is a ghost

Being in this house, I’ve occupied myself by folding my mother’s laundry and cleaning her dishes and picking up her towels and walking her dogs and making her food instead of facing her buzzard eyes directly

Being in this house, she picks me apart with her words as I’m left to hold her weight in my arms each night and walk along her eggshells

Being in this house, you can’t help but wonder what kind of divine punishment have I received; what sin so great that I alone must atone for the corpses of conversations that are both the skeletons in my closet and the one in front of me laying on her side on the sofa

Being in this house, buzzing flies and moths and mosquitos overlook the dignity I’ve stuffed into a backpack to take back up to college in the morning

Being in this house, where I’ve buried my anguish in my heart so that my chest may look bigger when I wake in the morning to the distraught in my younger brother’s eyes when I tell him I can’t stay here any longer

(2) To K,

The only face in the crowd that, no matter how old and how long we haven’t peered into each other, I’d recognize immediately

I don’t know where I was without you or how I survived before I came to this point, it’s like when I saw you, even before that, that I knew you would come into my life to stay

I can’t help but look at you and all that you are all that you will ever be and see my own future reflected in your eyes, even when I don’t want it to be

I was mad and spiteful and angry but between two people and their two strange lives who have shared so much in the time it takes to cross a street

I could never be angry with you

So do you promise to still leave the light on when it’s three AM and you want it off when we’re watching a movie

Do you promise to never go too close to the flame when kindling a fire

Do you promise to make sure to look both ways when crossing the street

Because we are only ever beautiful besides each other, never one without the other

Do you promise to be the older brother I never had,

If I was the younger sister you always wanted?

prompt on p. 149, # 6: Free verse with a rhyming scheme

The Other Woman

Falling in and out of love with you has been as if you have a blueprint to my anatomy

so you know where and where not to step on my soul

But even with the pale glint in your eyes over summer face time calls you still remain careless

You thrash and you bushwack and you’ve marked up words of mine that I’ll never admit to anyone

You’ve stomped around the graveyard that is the fragile heart I’ve fostered for you, now littered with things I never said

But here you are with her as my veins have been uprooted, now a vessel you’ve tainted oh so tactilely tart

The fat in my hips no longer clay in your hands, and I know this to be true because you touch her hair as if each strand were your mother’s pearls

You’ve never been one to care. You’ll step into my bed after the somber hours of our three am talks

Only to turn around and furl your fist and duck behind excuses

I’m expecting your love like I’ve never felt before

But maybe in another life I’ve mattered more

Anniversary poem: p. 248:

The One Who Left

How unfair we were ducking behind curtains

A pleasure I thought we’d be the only ones to share

Behind the burger king was a sanctuary we knew as home

The root to our love just as nameless because it could have been anywhere if it were with you

But you knew I couldn’t have stayed

And I knew I had to go, that it was just a matter of time before I felt content with losing you

Perhaps I was as blind as I am now to the unjustness of it all

Perhaps it’ll all happen again, and perhaps I will never have learned my lesson

I will run my tongue over many a lover’s teeth

But none’s lips will ever jolt and quiver,

None will be as fragile with their tongue,

As yours was with my lips

Perhaps it’s okay to be seen as infinite in someone else’s story

Dream Poem:

Holy Water

In this dream, this somber plane of existence where I’ve found myself drowned in black water

I’m trapped in a well with no bottom

I fear there is no top, so I don’t look up

Forever wondering why I’ve found myself baptized in such suffocating sin

I know when I wake the first thing I will feel is cornered into the remote recesses of my feeble mind

Because when you live amongst fantasy, everything becomes a metaphor

Bread Poem:

Hunger

In this kitchen where my younger brother watches me churn vegetables into a green stew, my hands are shaky

I have wanted to rip this pale frame apart limb by limb

to wiggle my teeth out and pull on the tongue that has willingly betrayed me before

to shed this exoskeleton of fatty decay off my fragile bones

to rid these rotting dances I’ve had where I’m teetering over the edge

Maybe there is more than this skin gripping my skeleton

But here, in this kitchen, my younger brother helps me make soup

Free Poem #3:

Yellow Roses

If this is the only universe where I’ve picked yellow roses for my friends, then the God I believe in must work off of the prayers of sinners

It’s as if when they look at me, they can see my thoughts as if they’ve been held inside this hollow skeleton adorned with glass skin

Since coming here, their words have softened me like rock and water, and as I’ve found myself in the middle of their arms- heart beats against my own- this is the closest we will be until we’re laid to rest side by side

These are the first people to know more about me than myself,

and I have hope that we will decay into each other, please let me melt into them as their kind souls have mingled with my own

Suppose poem:

Graveyard Shift

A reoccurring desire to find myself besides you in bed has left me empty

I suppose you’ve carved these feelings into my heart

fantasies where we’re lovers in this house replay each night

But you no longer live here, and you’ve left your knife stuck in my chest as I’m left to bleed

I feel akin to a ghost watching its lover move on

no one says anything when you turn the light off

I’m left to walk back alone

to find my way back to a haunted house

Pantumns!:

To Stay by His Side

To see the devoted decay that was my best friend recklessly ripping himself apart last June

To understand how intertwined he’s become with my own body that has bleed and sobbed itself into the pages of our divinities

To know that he and I will stay and stay and stay and stay and wait as no one has for each other in a matter that won’t dull

To feel the weight of himself like an orphan in my arms where the scars and impurities on the thin skin of our hearts echoes and reverberates

To be able to say that he loves me as I’ve loved him in a thousand different lives

To have this content in my soul is to know I’ve truly lived within the confines of our connection

To witness the careful architect with shaky hand and delicate voice as he’s sculpted himself back together this October

American Burying Beetle:

Deep Sea Isopod

A found home in a pale lilac, 2 foot husk most would deem frightful

She furls her body like a fist as creatures dwell near, I don’t think she likes to be perceived

a body devoted to feasting on creatures who’s lives have been lost to the ocean floor

Her terrain is lit by little bioluminescent stars, a comparison that she herself will never experience

a fourteen-legged gem that propels herself along a pristine void

I can’t help but feel an ache that she will never enjoy soup even though she has four jaws,

but perhaps she’s not smart enough to know how to swallow all of that