prompt: consider ‘trace elements’-- barely noticeable things and what they change. think butterfly effect! are their effects expected & small or disproportionate? is a ‘trace element’ an extra bit of DNA? is it some milk in a loaf of bread?

Absence [08/05/2024]

Something tiny.
Miniscule.
The lowest end of a bass line buried under the song.
That’s what you left in me.

Something big.
Groundbreaking.
Like how you can burn a whole forest down with a single match
If you light the right piece of grass.

I can feel it,
but I can’t claw it out.
It’s much too big
or much too small.

I see a trace of you wherever I go
Like a shadow or a ghost
Or an eyelash in my eye.
I try to claw it out and end up blind and bleeding

Something tiny.
Monumental.
Memories outside time and space
And passions I can't share with anyone else.
That’s what you left me with.

There’s a trace of you in my mirror.
I’m blessed, of course – I can still see you.
I’m cursed, I think – I can’t escape you.

A thousand or a million
Or ten tiny sparks
Adding up to us.
That’s what you left me with.
It made its way inside my skin,
It made its home inside my heart.
I can’t claw it out.
I can’t claw it out.
I end up dead and breathing.

thoughts about this week

Not sure if I have much to say. I wrote this fairly quickly, which I think is a bad habit – I'd benefit from more editing and pondering my writing instead of just spilling my guts and then changing some words. That's what I enjoy though, so I'm sticking with it for now, since it isn't professional work or anything like that. I don't love it, I actually rarely love my own poetry, but it's honest and what I have for this week.

prompt: write about or use asymmetry in your writing. what is the intrigue in imbalance? maybe work with different-sized stanzas or long, long sentences followed by short ones, or think about how no two bodies are the same, nor two halves of the same body, or how the feeling of a painting shifts with where the objects sit.

up/down [03/05/2024]

Higher and higher, your mother holds you up to see the artwork. As you get taller, the painting gets wider, stretches and shrinks and presents itself to you as something entirely new, and you applaud it when you see it for the first time. When you are a kid your mom looks like a skyscraper, and every painting looks different from down there.

The world shifts as you get older. The floor is further away, so you thought the sky would be closer. It isn’t. You can't understand why you even believed that in the first place.

But there used to be some perspective. When you look at everything from down, down, down below, huge hopeful eyes staring up, things get smaller as they get taller and you can’t make up the details but you imagine they are beautiful. Are they?

Now everything looks so flat, just like the author wanted it to be. The painting is hanging on the wall in front of you. A straight unending line from your eyebrows to the ink. Your eyes can follow the horizon until the sky vanishes, and you can’t see the details, but you imagine it’s just more of the same. It is.

When you are a kid your mom is a skyscraper, and when you are your mom you are just another pair of high heels trying to make no sound, reminding yourself to look straight ahead, chin up, eyes forward, always.

This is how the world was meant to be seen. This is how the men who built it saw it. You keep forgetting to ask: why did they make it flat? There are walls all around you. But that's unimportant. Chin up, eyes forward, keep walking straight ahead.

Your mom looks down from the artwork at you and the world bends all around your tiny floral dress and huge eyes and the floor looks different from up there, she only looks at it when she looks at you. Rain never comes from skyscrapers but you think maybe there’s a drizzle in your mother’s eyes but it’s all the way up there and she’s smiling and when you put it into perspective some rain is nothing compared to the vastness of the sun. You can always see it shining through the clouds, anyway.

So she holds you up for you to see the world as she sees it. You applaud it when the painting is laid flat in front of you for the first time. As it was meant to be. As it was made to be.

But there used to be some perspective.

thoughts about this week

I think if this was an essay I would get a big fat zero for not fullfiling the actual prompt. BUT. It is not an essay! So here it is. After reading the last part of the prompt, about the feeling of a painting shifting, I just couldn't stop thinking about this comic strip by Lynda Barry, and I had to write something about it, even if I ended up not really exploring what the comic strip is about (kind of?). What I wrote is just somewhere between the prompt, the comic strip and wherever my brain has been going this past month. I'll leave it here if you haven't seen it before. It changed my life fr