late luminescence

At school, we talk in dialects: sarcasm, dramatics, good student, jokes, and suspiciously angsty profundities. There are some days when I say so much of everything else that I forget my own mother tongue.

At first, when we texted, I could only hear everything in your voice. It made me laugh. Texting dialect is relatively monotonous-- it was strange to hear someone so lively condensed in such a way.

When you give someone a piece of you, it’s scary. But you feel light after. Some people like taking it, weighing it in an open palm as if determining worth. Some people run away, and leave you to melt down the shattered pieces and start again. Some people tuck it into themselves, and you never quite know if they mean to make a run out the automatic sliding door or if they are cradling it in the only way they know how.

Lots of people like to call the pieces hearts. But to me, that sounds like show & tell on the playground, when you get a new toy and everyone wants to touch it, or a Valentine's day box of candy hearts. LOVE ME, TEXT ME, SOUL MATE, YOU ROCK.

ME + YOU.

I’ve been lucky in my life to have and meet people who understand the mechanics of me-- they are hard to come by. Who knows where to put me even when I don’t know what to do with my hands.

And people change. Breaking, I’ve found, is inevitable. We weather in the wind, and rain, and sun until we wither away into sediment.

I forgot you were real. A part of me hopes I’ll be able to confess this to you someday, and a part of me hopes I never do. It’s funny how your favorite parts of the day can become your most dreaded. There are worse things than being strangers.

The magic eight ball says to ask again later. I don’t think I have the courage to do so.

posted on: https://youngwritersproject.org/node/42440 & Daily Read

11/6/21: "I've been trying not to think about it, but I can't help it"

Refrozen
I can't help but huff a small laugh
As I bask in the fog while you run away
--straight into another stranger.

We are strangers too, your back reminds me.

And yet, I can pull out my phone to say,

"hey"

"yeah"

"that was awkward"

Because I know you, and we know absolutely nothing.

I've been trying to do things without reason,
you know, just because.

I fish around my pocket for my coupons of courage,
and watch your retreating figure do the same.

The crisp day raises an eyebrow at the checkout line,
so we quickly pull out our bills of silence, rumpled soft.

Which is really to say we pull out our earbuds and our phones,
and plug into something that will make the loss feel less lonely.

Ice refrozen is harder to break than before.
And, our courage at 7 am is well,

sleepy~

Hello, hello, hello!

No piece in this post, though I do eventually want to write one about these turtles! I can't believe I didn't know that the mall near my house HAS TURTLES. Smh Audrey.

Today's post is kinda heavy, and not the most interesting, but for other young writers out there I think it's important to say this.

I start this blog almost exactly a year ago, and in that amount of time I have indeed grown a lot as a poet. That being said, I also fell into the very competitive mindset when it came to writing competitions and literary magazines. I was basically entering these contests and submitting work to publications that I did and still do not feel was my best. As a result, most of my pieces did not win or get published. I too often justified this with the luck component of the writing world.

It is definitely true that to win writing competitions one needs a certain degree of luck. But effort is just as important, and luck without effort is worthless, because what does it matter if you win or get published with pieces that are not your best? It would be rewarding bad character, and would stunt growth as opposed to aiding it.

I've been rather silent on all of my favorite writing communities and haven't finished any pieces these past few months. I'm trying to find my voice again. I want to produce pieces I can be proud of, as I was with my earlier pieces.

One of the things I have decided is okay is to continue updating this blog. I've definitely neglected it, and I think it could be healthier for me to focus more on posting work I like as opposed to posting on writing communities pieces I think other people will like. Whenever I finally work my way back to being okay with submitting pieces to contests and publications again, my work might come up and down a bit, but I don't know if that will be happening for a while.

In thinking about Late Luminescence, I also considered completely wiping this blog and starting over from scratch. I've decided not to do this, despite how bad I think my previous pieces are. It's important to me that other young writers see how terrible I was, because really, with enough dedication, it's not hard to become better.

I have a long way to grow, and I hope you'll stick with me for it. Have a phenomenal summer!


Best,
Amaryllis Joy (Audrey)

Girls and balconies, boys and drain pipes

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/923705

I aspire one day to be a good memory.
It’s a sad dream.

some nights I wake up,
And curl around the metal box.

There’s a certain scavenger hunt mindset,
Easter, overpriced and for adults

that comes with yard sales.

I can sell you shaded water fountains
And puddling laughter on the blacktop.

Cackling into sobbing, cracking eggs.
My yellow yolk spilling out into the bowl,

Pour carnival confetti on your hair

while watching you gasp in the sink tank.
Kicking, oh how I used to kick,

A blind fury of flailing limbs in the pool.

I just drown now, and don’t turn on properly
I’m broke, broken.

Do you want to buy me? I’m worth

The empty mason jars on the window sill;
A washing machine pretty, dizzy;
fake aged paper, abused, steeped in tea.

After all,
no sane person would ever
sell their darlings,

Me: $ to be determined
when you leave me behind by the sunset, in my nice Sunday dress.

posted on: https://youngwritersproject.org/node/40261

(embarrassing): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RN0uMXm7Q1Q4t5-ckUFpjxxALRPS-aPk/view?usp=sharing

(embarrassing 2.0): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jmV8G-qJypjfZnn5eu8oZc_JtDddnNJ7/view

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/922352

I’m tired of writing poems about big things.

Instead, I’ll write about you and I, not as a shard of glass
representative of the sand and lightning and broken window panes
on a hazy summer tinged with puffy eyes and runaways who didn’t know
quite, what’d they’d broken.

Just as eyes and a nose and a mouth that envelops
silver spoons in front of a TV and teeth and sink through
soft mango pits, savoring the sweet cold flesh.

Just broad planes and angular collarbones and shoulders
to give way to wild arms waving in the wind like those wavy people
in front of a gas station, gesticulating as if there is a fire within you burning
or a fly in the air you might like to go away, but not kill quite with grandma’s
fly swatter,

imagine the black splotch on the wall

Just sides sloping into embraceable waists and soft cotton T-shirts
and a plush belly of smooth soft skin and a belly button that smiles
in the center, warm and loud and contented, everything anyone
has ever been in our cores, but that doesn’t mean we should judge on
geometry, dear.

Just hip bones that jut out slightly, they need to be known,
and give way to thighs, pillars and soft vessels of love
and secret places -- moles and divots and leg hair

And the best parts, your knees so wrinkled and scarred
with some falls I bet you can’t even remember
You press outward fireworks into them under the table and I screech,
sporadically spilled water at Souplantation and flowers bloom up my bloodstream

But boy, did they also love being skinned on cement and thickets of jasmine bushes
If only to remind me how it felt to be hurt and feel strong
For not crying, and watching the red mingle with dirt

as it all goes down the drain

Just downward shins and quaint ankles and flat feet
Elongated over the years, but still repainted with that hideous midnight blue nail polish
I bought at the dollar store
But the bottoms of our feet, with their weathered heels
and sensitive bottoms that are so serious

That you laugh when I stroke them with my fingertips,
trying to curl away and screaming as if it hurts while
Delighting and aching at being so vulnerable, limbs lashing out
in an attempt to regain reign of your body

And these kisses pressed into our hair,
Chins and elbows resting on our heads until we grow
too tall to be comfortably called children

Now though, we can still stack our heads like Jenga blocks
Just us two, like we used to
Resting our tired heads on one another on car rides
To the mountains and the oceans

You know, the big things.

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/921924

For so many years, through elementary school, middle school, and even high school, we've been taught poetry as haikus and Dr. Seuss, as sonnets and Shakespeare. We are taught syllables and rhymes, metaphors and alliteration, iambic pentameter and line breaks. We have masterful poetry shoved down our throats, glimpse genius and are given a pencil, a notebook, and a packet of poetic torture devices to recreate it.

But how can we, when we've never learned what poetry is? Instead, we are only taught to hate it.

The issue stems from the fact that there isn't a concrete definition for poetry. Poetry is forgiving, and poetry is accepting. If the poet calls a piece poetry, it is poetry. Poetry in itself has no rules, but the poet has the ability to create new challenges for themself.

Thus, teachers cannot contain poetry, nor can they convey the power and possibility of poetry without becoming vague and contradictory. After all, poetry, at its core, is completely subjective.

Being lover of books, I have naturally wheedled my friends to read more in an attempt to share my overflowing adoration for novels. From these experiences, I have found that the main reason people don’t like reading isn't because they don’t like reading. It's because they are reading the wrong books.

The same goes for poetry. I've only just fallen in love with poetry, and already I've diagnosed the same problem in all of my friends. They weren't reading the poems that enraptured them, that made them look up with wide eyes, stab the page with their fingers, and say “Yes, that’s me!”.

We've been reading the wrong poems. Or perhaps we've just been reading poems.

Having been caught up in the paradox of how to teach poetry, many teachers seem to have given up, expressing that poetry is “too indefinable, and too abstract to teach”. Instead, many teachers, like Margaret B. Ackerman of the University of Tulsa, believe in “teaching poems”.

You know the like. The Road Not Taken (Robert Frost), Mother to Son (Langston Hughes), Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? (Shakespeare). As one of my best friends put it, we are taught poetry as if it is “a dead art”. As a junior in high school, I can attest that I've never been given a poem by a 21st century poet. Up until last year, I didn’t know people still wrote poetry as a legitimate occupation.

The classics are beautiful; I cannot deny them that. But having only changed my opinion on poetry recently, I have to admit that I hated them before having actually tried to write a poem for the sake of writing a poem. We can be taught poems, but it cannot be all that we are taught. We need to be taught why -- not for culture, not for history. How can an elementary school student grasp that? Instead, it can be as simple as what aspiring writer Rebecca Roach proposes: “we invented language, [so] we invented something fun [and] awesome to do with it”.

That’s not to say we can’t learn from poems. As writers, we have to read them to improve. But there's simply no way to learn from or appreciate the classics if we don’t even know what we’re looking for. We need to learn to read like writers.

Lately, I've been enthusiastic to help my peers with all of their dreaded poetry assignments. However, in trying to help them through the process of writing a poem, the most common and frustrating part is that they refuse to even begin writing.

There is so much emphasis, especially in high school, on what’s right, and what’s wrong. What’s good, and what’s bad. There is so much pressure to succeed, so much shame in perceived failure. We are taught in our essays to remove every "I", every trace of our own voices. So, even when we’re older, we already have had this disgusting perception of our own ideas ingrained into us, and the idea that poetry could be subjective is too foreign, irreconcilable with our competitive worldviews.

We can’t continue on like this. By continuing to teach poetry this way, the current education system prevents the millions of students that go through it the chance to experience poetry. To gain it as a coping skill, a form of expression, and a different perspective.

So how are teachers supposed to teach poetry?

Tell us that poetry can be anything. It can be beautiful, it can be funny, it can be utterly disgusting. Tell us that poetry is the power to play with words.

Give us the chance to write. Let us pen a poem about whatever we want: how we feel about anyone, anywhere, and anything. No prompt, no rhyme, no punctuation or grammar. No rules, just emotions and opinions. Most importantly, tell us it's going to be bad.

Only afterwards can the teachers pull out the dusty classics. But, you can’t just stick to Silverstein, to Shakespeare, to rhyme and rhythm and “thou art” ‘s. Bring out some Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, and Amanda Gorman. Embolden and inspire us with student examples. Tell us with more than words that poetry is not dead, and that it doesn’t have to rhyme. Show us that it is very much alive.

This also means that teachers have to accept that there is more than one way to interpret a poem. It's okay if a student doesn’t understand a piece. There is no right or wrong on either side. There is no shame. We all write differently, and if we read like writers, this is inevitable. Embrace your students' genius, and share with us your own.

Then, let us write again. And again. And again, and again, and again.

Teach us to learn poetry. Let us love it. We, as students and as people, cannot be deprived of it any longer.

Night spills the ink of a day

ground to our bones

rooted in place under our eyelids.

the smell of ink addictive,

and laughing gusts, the best type of cancer?

Love braids peach blossoms into figments of want,

and into mother of pearl arm rests on chairs as old as me.

She weaves sunbeams and morning dew and makes

sugared zodiac animals that dance in her blood.

Gives them flower language,

but all they see is a tree--

spindly tree branches cynical, leafless

for another 三千年， 你知道嗎？

One with our names etched, the trunk where we spilled wine

and then flung our arms around the goddess' legs

as the children, the wailing, do.

I cut myself on the swiss army knife the other day,

and I have finally learned how to mourn with her.

If I squint hard enough in the evening,

I can nearly see the pink glow of your cheeks again.

Some day I'll learn how to play flower centers on zithers,

but tonight writing our skeletal silhouettes on the page is enough.

I run a hand down her wrinkled bark and sink into the divots

& grooves, falling asleep to see you again.

酒, me and her, your name.

It's morning, and her boughs are finally heavy with immortality,

so why you are not here to eat the peaches?

___

三千年， 你知道嗎 (san qian nian, ni zhi dao ma?): Three thousand years, do you know?

酒 (jiu): wine

三生，三世，十里桃花 (san sheng, san shi, shi li tao hua): Three lives, three worlds, and ten miles of peach blossoms [a popular chinese drama (that I loved)]

posted on: https://youngwritersproject.org/node/39186

posted on: https://youngwritersproject.org/node/38955 & Daily Read

posted on: https://youngwritersproject.org/node/38643 & Daily Read 1/27/21

in metaphor. A metamorphosis of breath, and the air swims in water until I have none left to give. They go up, to bed, to dinner, to Sundays roasted in hellfire and Mondays saturated in sin.

because I am 70% water and if I stay I will be filled

and popped from the inside out. How to wrap myself into a sphere, tiny globes of rainbows that will make me ephemerally Earth-like? Greedy fingers always seek the heart for riches, and at last, my empty innards will be missed, desired.

like tubs of shampoo bubbles

and aluminized plastic on trees, a poetic death for the one who was afraid of leaving quietly in the night. The water refracts light into kinds of itself, bending streams into golden ribbons that weave through salt and hair and weeds who reign free.

collapsing

against the surf, and divided kernels of sand don't stand a chance. United, I am powerfully mute in the face of the moon's decree and wind's war cry. Seabreeze, I sink and sink and build shipwrecks by cramming fireworks in my mouth and wrapping my bloated body in curtains of bubble wrap, seafoam frothing as I wait for the inevitable explosion.

into a contented rage.

that is recycled. Eons and the same ions remain, remolded time after time. Evidence of a death obsessed over.

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/757596

I'll admit that, kneeling by the bookshelf to skim the dilapidated spines of well-loved books for compulsory SSR, I thought that "Jacob Have I Loved" was the beginning of a light-hearted, standard, YA romance. But, if the biblical reference above wasn't a good enough indicator, it's not. It is a thousand times better than one.

The voice that first pulls you in is that of Sara Louise-- or Wheeze, as she is called by the majority of the other characters. Her voice immediately bleeds through the paper, her melancholy tone inviting as she describes her plans to pick up her mother, the last of their family from her childhood home island, Rass. It quickly devolves-- or evolves, I would argue-- into a few pages worth of rich yet honest descriptions of the island as she sees it in her mind's eye.

Then, in the next page, we properly meet Sara Louise as I will always envision her: crabbing on a boat with Call (her only friend), matter-of-fact and a bit rough around the edges, the only contented glimpse of her we see before her life begins to spiral.


"Life begins to turn upside down at thirteen"


And for her, the first inkling of change begins with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The war is referred to here and there, but for the most part, it only fuels the despair she falls into at times. Her voice grows up as the book progresses, from that of a hopeless romantic to that of an angsty and stubborn teenager. This is one of the main reasons I love this book though-- the characters. Their father, their mother, their grandmother, Call, the Captain, and Caroline are all nuanced in different ways. They have their kind moments, and they have some moments where you wish Sara Louise would slap some sense into them. I could go on for days about how I simply know their dad has the kindest, crinkliest eyes, and how Caroline has the fairest skin with thin stands of golden hair like the straw Rumplestiltskin spun in that fairytale.

Onto the main character. Sara Louise is the type of person who is so far from perfect, it's hard to see her as a main character. However, she is good enough to make you passionately root for her will pom poms and glitter as you watch her life play out. She deals with these imperfections as many of us prefer to do-- to just not deal with it. She loves, she hates, she is impulsive, she is thoughtful, and she is the embodiment of a beautifully flawed character.


"Shouldn't I have been a minute's worry? Wasn't it all the months of worry that had made Caroline's life so dear to them all?"


The main source of her insecurities, though, surrounds the fact that she is the older twin to the delicate, beautiful, and musically gifted, Caroline. The depiction of this sibling relationship is the most accurate one I've found to date-- you love them, you hate them, you're proud of them, and sometimes you just really need to explode on them.

I wouldn't say this book is about how Sara Louise overcomes all of this; rather, it is how she comes to terms with it. With such a flawed character though, I understand why some people on Goodreads have given this low stars. Some of the content this book covers, while not not quite taboo, are relatively unsavory topics to discuss and admit to in public. Some of these include embarrassing crushes, shameful thoughts of pure hate, dysfunctional family dynamics, and how Christianity can be wielded to be cruel. But at the end of the day, I would say that they made the book better, because we are truly being able to see all of Sara Louise's thoughts, rather than just a censored version.

In addition, this book makes me cry every. single. time. I have waited for it's emotional hold on me to loosen up, but it never does. In that one particular scene, the climax of the novel, I am there, scrubbing already clean windows and screaming at my mother because I am so mad at the world and I don't know why.


"'I turned so that I would not see either of their faces, a sob rising from deep inside me. I pounded on the side of the house to stop the tears, smashing out each syllable. 'God in Heaven, what a stupid waste.'"


Perhaps it is because I am an oldest child. Perhaps it is because I have thoughts I'd never want anyone to see. But mostly, I think it's because I am human. A mediocre human, a normal teenager, an everyday kind of girl. Which is all Sara Louise is, really. In the end, she doesn't become Cinderella and become a princess who smiles prettily at her sisters from the castle. She doesn't turn into a frog or single-handedly kill the Huns (or in the remake, the Rourans) and save all of China.

So, if I really were to have to boil it down to a genre, "Jacob Have I Loved" is a coming of age story in realistic historical fiction. But it is a "story" in the truest sense possible-- real place, real people, real lives, even if Rass and Sara Louise and this story are but collages of islands, teenagers, and lives.


"But there were only two of us, my sister Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay."

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/913275