1-22-15

Apricot Fuzzies

I want to get lost
in lilac and apricot and pearl
and curl in the comfort
of a spring sweater,
for the warmth to rub off
like some machine fuzzy lint
sewn into the way I wear my attitude-
I want warm smiles
and cozy days
to hug me
like mama sometimes does
when it's been a long day
but there's still something
worth smiling for.

Inspiration: http://www.hm.com/us/product/78725?article=78725-G&variant=004

1-20-15

It's crazy to think this is the last weekend of my childhood. I'm turning 18 next Saturday. I just submitted photographs from Ireland to the Sun Magazine. It'd be cool if I got published for photography too. I just spent a lot of time doing my Art Editor Role for Èlan. I think the powerpoint for Spring voting and reviews is almost complete.

I'm extremely tired and it's 10:13. But I promised I would try to write daily. I think the easiest thing to do would be to pick an art submission and write an ekphrastic poem from it. I don't know about publishing rights and getting people's permission to have their art on my blog, so I might put this post on private.

This is called Danaus Liber by Sarah Dusek at Savannah Arts Academy.

Butterflies Spit

She walks the earth pale and small and scared. 

Frail child, cocoon.  

Cover nothing anymore. 

Expose life.  

Stretch to grasp streaks of stratus in the sky

Make all of the world listen,

 ears of stethoscopes to your first real breath, 

surge like monsoon, spit like lava, hiss like hail:

 I matter.  

No more hiding. 

You are not Ann Frank

or a woman behind sheer cloth. 

There is no more waiting to be alive

in textbooks or history

men will learn

the silent, graceful, "lady"

has two wings

(two hands)

one for middle fingers

and the other for flying bombs

shooting arrows

and pointing guns

the deadliest wound

comes from realizing 

an entire existence of wrong.  

Goals

I realize that I already made a blog post today but I feel like making another. Madisen Kuhn has inspired me so much. She's a writer that graduated high school last year. She didn't go to college. She's making her own book. She's flying to New York and having meet ups. She's getting social media famous with 25k instagram followers. Here's some pictures of her:

That's her in New York. And the pic below shows her trendy style, which I adore. 

 She has inspired me to make my own goals. 

1. Write a poem daily

2. Plan to have a chapbook out by January next year

3. Keep submitting to contests and publications

4.Grow my social media

5. Continue being me

6. Treat my writing as Career Plan A, not Career Plan B

You & Imagination Poems

So, I've got this assignment to experiment with sound. Other news today: I got a Publix sub and the lady making it hit on me. I had some jalapeño chips today. I sewed a hole in my friend Tre's Hawaiian shirt on the bus. My APES teacher is sick so I don't have to slave over completing my lab notebook tonight.

Anyways, I wanted to write something about flower and word metaphors. It ended up being a poem about how destructing love can be. I've only dated one person, and I don't think this speaks true for the relationship, but oh well, the poem became what it is. The second poem is about being bored in math class and my mind zoning out to someplace else.

You

The world ticks black and blind. Your lips outpour orchids. Words slip down the slope of your petal tongue. Your teeth are seeds settling in the roots of your gums; waiting to unfold into blossom. When you talk your mouth is a vase of wild flowers, the type that weed killer or fertilizer can’t tame. Some of the things you say flicker like flies, gone into a distance but with a buzz left beaming in the cavity of the ear. Being with you looks like lost foxes fumbling in ferns. I am the fox, red roses pinned to my toes and matches of fur lit with red fire. You are the gasoline and the sun that makes the ferns grow. The ferns encase my body like seaweed stealing the controls of my limbs, I swim sideways, gurgling and gasping for air in your presence because you are the jellyfish stinging in the skin’s salty wounds: forget me not when the sun streaks the sky and the night black dries white. And then I can see the wounds you’ve left: the damage, dear, of loving you.

Imagination

It is dangerous for a math teacher to wear that type of shirt: a shirt quite literally displaying blue waves of an ocean. Parabolas drool out my mind and I slip into something else: there is a boat and my two eyes are the passengers. The white sheet sail cries out in the fog for a direction.  My body belongs to the rusting floorboards; the boards dissolve, bleeding into the depths of the water. I boil down, hair fanning like anemone’s hundred arms, flowing from my scalp. I see the Earth in scales, shimmering like a sunshine I used to know where there was air. My body guilds into gills. Green seaweed floats besides me and I think of a memory, no a theory maybe: a marsh of hairy grasses that used to nuzzle to the ground with the breeze where I stood, looking over the Jacksonville marshes with my father, wishing I had binoculars to see into an existence I was too far away to reach. 

Notes on Being a Writer

I call myself the writer, but am I a writer? I've done seven years of art school for writing. I've been published. I've performed. But so what? Do I internally, in every morsel of my soul really resonate as a writer?

I'm making a new goal for myself: write, damn it, just write. This blog will turn into a daily writing routine. Fingers crossed I'll stick to it. Perhaps I'll end up with some kick ass pieces from this. Someone once said "If I write a short story a week I'm bound to have at least one good story out of 52." Well this is me experimenting to see if a daily/weekly writing habit speaks some truth about quality and growth.

Mainly, I don't tend to write when a prompt isn't shoved under my nose. That sounds awful but it's true. A classroom tends to make some incredible things exist, whether I'd like to admit it or not.

So here's a random prompt I found off the internet:
The interplanetary travel nonprofit Mars One is holding a competition for those eager to be the first humans to live on Mars. One of the finalists has said, “If I die on Mars, that would be an accomplishment.” Would you ever volunteer for such a mission? Do you have what it takes to survive on a desolate, desert planet? Write about how you’d feel if you got the opportunity to leave Earth. What would you miss, and what would you be glad to leave behind?
(http://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises)

2015 Mission Call for Mars

The television lines blur dampened voices: "a hundred candidates! be the first to sip breath on Mars and create civilization." When  I think of Mars I think of my mother in her frail nightgown on the couch with a pen between her lips, a sudoku puzzle on a print of black and white newspaper cushioned between her legs. I think of the clutter coughed beside the couch: coiled candy wrappers sucking up life from their aluminum forms, a lamp laughing down at humanity in the dance of its drunk dulling bulb. The Earth would not spin for me without these few unmistakable things. The voice of a mother: even the simplest  how was your day creates life in a home. I wouldn't make myself say goodbye to here if I had the planets tied on leashes like sprinting dogs in my bleeding palms.