late luminescence

(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