Both about two different people…two different souls. And I’m always in wonder at how my heart can hold so much, and how much it is constantly asked to let go of. And how defiantly (and dumbly) it doesn’t. I guess that’s why poetry exists, n’est-ce pas? To have a convenient shelf to set our hearts on when we can’t bear to walk around with their contents sloshing unevenly in our chests? Anyway. Here’s poetry.
tender ache
weren't you just the subtle pine rising from penitent footfalls along quiet trails
weren't you just the romantic glide of a train across forested peaks the anticipation of journeys towards something better
weren't you just the late summer glow of sun kissed honey dripping into the waiting cup of succulent apricot flesh
weren't you just...
weren't you just
the hard turn left that slammed my heart's momentum into a concrete pylon
weren't you just the biting words tearing away at delicate seams of newly grown flesh
weren't you just the coldness of an unexpected glacier cleaving through my underbelly sinking me into the dark
You would think, that laughter among friends would dull the incessant ache of missing you
but somehow in any joy I miss you more
daydreaming, apart from crowds, that you sit across my table eyes crinkling with the absurd infectiousness of silly mirth like bird wings in my heart and shoulder shrugs of isn't this life terrible? beautifully terrible? but when your eyes meet mine it feels
only beautiful
knowing you exist is like a breath added to the dying embers of hope
you're still the only thing that helps me sleep
I imagine you slide into bed beside me curl warm length into my cold lonely chin tucked into my neck, arms like blankets hold me close and push out the rest
Disappointed I can’t find an image of the scene when John Gavin shouts this line while fumbling with a live chicken and coming out of a tranquilized haze.Apparently, the internet DOES NOT have everything.
I’m not immune to the fact that this blog has tripped around in the dark a bit lately. Let’s be honest, all of us are probably tripping in the dark. We’re in unprecedented times, facing stresses and noise that we’ve never dealt with before. It’s easy, in the dissonance, to lose our path.
So for the next three to four months, the first week of the month, I’ll be getting organized and coming back to a series I ran a few years back called the Beautiful Writer’s Workshop. I’ll probably skip around a bit, everything from how to submit your work to how to organize your series. No, I’m not going to make you deconstruct your sentences into diagrams, circling your subject, double scoring your gerunds, slashing through your adverbs (or will I? Could be a fun practice in the lost art of sentence diagramming AND tortuous. I’m a girl who likes it a little rough).
For the love of all that is good and holy…
I’ll be re-blogging in line with issues I’m seeing my students face, and those I’m facing myself. For as many classes as I’ve taken on any number of writing related topics, I always seem to glean something new. Hopefully these little once-a-month writing lessons can help you too. If you have specific issue you’ve been fighting with, contact me and I’ll try to run a post about it.
That’s not to say I won’t occasionally throw in a “stop being assholes to each other” rant. I like to keep it exciting after all.
It’s been a while since we dabbled in the lighter word count and heavier hand of poetry so I thought…why not start there? Especially since this is the first week of National Poetry Month.
(Hold on to your asses, she’s about to ADULT over here!)
Poetry used to be the sole conveyer of great stories, epic tales, and the meat and potatoes of religious creed. The first believed poem, author unknown, was called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Besides this epic, there was Rig Vedas of Hinduism, and The Song of The Harper from Egypt. Centuries before we first heard a Greek throw down an ode to an urn, people were writing poems.
Poetry was borne in the heart of burgeoning cultures and empires. As we move west across the world, we have The Iliad, Beowulf, 154 shout outs to Will Shakespeare’s best girl(s) (and possibly boys?), and eventually, on to the new world with works like The Song of Hiawatha.
From these epic and structured beginnings, poetry has evolved and moved, like a river around obstacles, constant but ever-changing. One of the reasons I love poetry is its ability to capture the heartbeat of time-periods through the use of its language and form, as well as the ideas that it holds.
Poetry records history. From the simplest nursery rhymes (“Mary, Mary Quite Contrary” was actually based on Queen Mary I, aka Bloody Mary, who tortured and killed hundreds of protestants. Silver Bells and Cockle Shells aren’t perennials, they’re torture devices.) to Walt Whitman’s descriptions of the horror and decimation from America’s Civil War (“O Captain, My Captain” was written about the assassination of Lincoln just before the close of the ‘storm’ of war) poetry is a powerful conveyer of humankind’s journey through time.
Poetry connects. It’s visceral and often uncomfortable. It paints pictures with the deepest hues of language. Poetry is vital to song writing, memory retention, and a host of other deep-seated neural mechanisms humans use to survive. (the ABC song, “Thirty days hath September…”, “I before E except after C–and about a dozen other exceptions because the English language is a bastardized torture device for anyone learning it”)
So how do you write a poem?
Well, that’s the beautiful thing. We are no longer shackled to the 15 line iambic pentameter, nor are we beholden to ends that rhyme. Poetry can be written in just about any form you can conceive. You can write it, you can rap it (rap=rhythm and poetry), you can sing it, you can paint it across a street in bold letters. There are no rules but one.
Poetry should be true to your soul.
It should never be half-way. It should fling open the shutters of your close-held heart and expose it to the light. Poetry should reflect the thoughts and the feelings, the commiseration and worry, the anger and peace, the joy or the sadness that fills your head and your community. The simplicity of a world rarely observed in detail. The shadows of what lingers in the memory of scents and phrases. The ignored, buried, and burned histories of forgotten and enslaved peoples.
When I think of poetry, I think of catharsis and a means to work through big and hard emotions (a girl’s favorite kind?) I think of finding meaning and perspective, shrinking down the large imposing impossibilities to moments I can do something with. To feelings I can direct towards change. I think of telling the truth, especially when it’s hard. I think of informing the world of a voice and perspective that once was silenced.
To write a poem is to be truthful about what hurts most in that moment. And what survives through the grit of human spirit.
I’m sure you can guess this week’s exercise. Write some poetry. In any form you want. Send it to me, let me know if you want it to have a little spot here on The Beautiful Stuff, or if you rather just share it with another soul. I don’t have a preference for form or length. Just get to the darkness, poke around in there, tickle the tender underbelly of what drives your biggest emotions and tug it out into the light.
If you’re looking for a group to join and a community to support you through the month with a light-hearted challenge, check out Writing Heights Writers Association Poetry Challenge (30 prompts, 30 days, Discord server check in, and a month free membership with WHWA: email newsletter@writingheights.com for more info, it’s okay to get a late start)
I’ve been writing a lot of rage poetry and journal entries lately. It’s a method of processing, a safe space where my feelings won’t be chastised or be cautioned to calm down. To be told, with shrugs, that this is just the way it is. To be hounded with others’ convictions that I’m being the irrational one (or worse, the powerlessness, of ‘nothing can be done’). No wonder women go mad. No wonder we quit our jobs and our relationships in droves. I think someday we’ll all probably wander of the grid and go feral. I hope that someday our leaving destroys the grid completely. I hope ‘feral’ is a return to what we were always supposed to be. In ownership of our own bodies, part of an egalitarian community, taking care of the Earth that sustains us, protecting one another. I hope for this.
Today’s poem is part of a project I’m working on, tracing philosophically through the roots of my own rage, and the collective anger of my generation of women. Raised to believe we could be equal from a generation that was slowly learning it themselves. As such, this poem is an exploration and an ode to one of the most influential albums (and songs) of my teenage years. And to the seeds that she planted in my soul, that have found a fearsome bloom in current times.
The Jagged Little Pill (I can No Longer Swallow) (lyrical exploration of "All I Really Want" by Alanis Morissette)
All I really want is deliverance
from the maddening hold of the lesser sex’s self inflation
Do I stress you out?
to remind you that you came from a womb and still she chose to keep you even after all the repulsions she knew you would own and call power?
I am frightened by the corrupted ways of this land
when faced with pedophilic horrors and the butchering of innocence as if it were any other expendable resource men rape the land, why not us too? why not our daughters? our sons? we are fresh streams and teeming oceans gold mines and diamond fields all for the taking all for the discarding
Reel them in and spit them out
calm down there is nothing to be done let the broader shoulders shrug to end the matter
I am frustrated by your apathy
while you drink your martini and cast sunshine, between sips, that at least the stock market is finally up and I sit still, as prey praying in bushes might, cheap wine I feel guilty for and watch blood run in the gutters and remember my own, horrible 8-year-old truths while the news blares of babies being eaten or burned or buried by the ninth hole water hazard and sand trap thank fucking god the stock market is okay
the sound of pretenses falling
is louder to me but you were never listening anyway, were you? just for the sound of panties dropping be a good little girl for daddy sit on my lap and reassure me, I’m still a ‘nice guy’ right?
No.
I won't speak these lies any longer my lips have been sewn shut needles in and out the thread of anger trapping unsettled bees in my throat and handcuffed wrists bleeding as I fight against the radiator of the American Dream
why are you so petrified of silence?
does it make you hear the echoes of your own dissonance? A good man who still sometimes objectifies his high school students and calls it ‘American Beauty’
And all I really want is some peace a place to find a common ground
but we aren’t standing on even ground never was there equal footing from the day I spilled out of my mother my knees have been broken by the bat of masculine ‘protection’ my voice scalded with the shame this system gave me for a body that nature knew and named as more divine
I’ve been reading a lot of writing and life advice for the past few years (few, meaning 18 years?) As we’re approaching February and another Writing Heights Writing Challenge, I feel a little edgy in my gut. Knowing there’s an accountability is part of it. Knowing that a lot of the writers I follow have been recently talking about their writing habits and writing every day. Knowing that the last two to three years I’ve been in an editing whirlpool (stacks of books written that are now under contract means back-to-back edits and very little new content.) And I think the edginess is resting somewhere in the knowledge, that I haven’t written anything new lately.
Okay, back up a tick. Yes, I finished the last novel for the Timekeeper Series in October. But that book was bit of a possessed demon to both my process and my love of writing. I won’t go into it now, but suffice to say, it did not feel like the beautiful, flowing, creative river that writing often is for me. It was more like I had to manufacture a kayak run by diverting a real river into a human-made one. Anyway, what was my point? Ah yes, I haven’t written anything lately.
I could just as easily use the February challenge to work on edits and it would count. I could even more easily, not participate at all. But I’m starting to feel (admittedly with the unneeded pressure of listening to other writers’ processes) like I’m not much of a writer anymore. I have a hard time nowadays, sitting down and just writing. And it kind of breaks my heart because I always feared that this might happen. That I’d get to a point when I was out of ideas for story. When I had no one left I wanted to follow in their journey. That I would be resigned to teaching instead of doing and reliving glory days behind book jackets of years-ago published work.
But maybe it’s not that I lack story. Maybe there are still characters still locked away in there. And maybe I’ve just thrown curtains over them in my constant state of editing. Maybe what my writing really needs, is a challenge to sit down and recommit to it again. So…I’m looking ahead and spending some quiet time to myself, to think about what a good, but not overwhelming challenge might bring me back to the essential core of who I am as a writer. How can I be present again with the creative process?
It will need time. It will require me to let go of some other things that have siphoned off minutes and hours in my day. It will need consistency, and the letting go of perfectionism. It will need a dash of whimsy and a whole shake of bravery. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ll let you know who I find beneath the curtain. And if my edits take a little longer. If my house is a little dustier. If the email responses lag and I don’t make every meeting…perhaps that is a better thing for my overall existence. I’ll even schedule some write-ins through Discord, at some local coffee shops and the occasional brewery. Keep an eye on my social for when and where.
If you want to be a part of my bumbling reset, it’s free to join the challenge. I’d love to meet you there. We can figure this thing out (once more, again) together.
A bit more Hallow’s Eve than New Year’s Eve…but this came from a poetry challenge a few years ago and I thought it was interesting.
Corvidae
Black oiled beauty needle claws to grip solid to my eye sockets no longer needed by me
I'd rather be your throne
and you can be my new eyes and continue on in this dark world light glinting and soul exposed in the off feather sheen and firelight behind your beaded eyes
ever higher, above the madness that ended me you will be my wings and I will be your resting stone your peaceful, calcified nest of respite
you will be my freedom from the fog of earth the stains of so many moments now rested in the dry and brittle grass
we are a pair dark wanderer above the grief of an impermanent world together in easy camaraderie until your bones rest atop mine
the world will go on, in wreck and ruin growing up through our silent jawed beaks until we are stones in the grass nothing and everything more
On this day you shouldn’t be checking your email. I hope, instead, you are watching holiday movies, and still in your pajamas, and drinking coffee, and finding joy, and calling your loved ones, and eating one more cinnamon roll, and picking up pieces of taped wrapping paper, stuck to the floor, and feeling…feeling…feeling, the light and warmth of the season. Feeling that you can finally settle down. Feeling that this is the day to rest and think about nothing in particular. I’m here with you.
On this day you might also be mourning, and seeped in a kind of loneliness that feel worse than on any other day. You may be trying to keep hurtful memories at bay, or separated and far from the people you love. You loved. Maybe this day you are begging for it to be swift and end quickly, because you cannot bear to be told to carry joy when pain is taking up all the space inside your chest. I’m here with you too.
And so, here’s a little poem, nothing your brain needs to work too hard at. Nothing as important as honoring where you are at, and being gentle to whatever is filling your heart. I am here with you.
Flight
a fallen feather is a piece of grounded soul aimless without a body to lift a reminder of once great heights no longer attainable
she is a sign from the gods that even the most perfect designs lose elemental fragments along the bumpy ride and every fragment shed is an updraft not caught
still, I think they’re pretty and I tuck them into books and pin them to walls and read in them messages in the timing of their arrival along my path on my right means yes, left is no even when a question hasn’t formed yet
maybe if I collect enough I can build my own wings someday maybe leave this place, a curtain of elemental fragments lost pieces of soul, to lift
Good morning. Wednesdays are what I affectionately call “Therapy Thunder Dome” (would have a better ring if it were “Therapy Thunder Dome Thursdays” but we work with what we have). So since my little peabrain will be too tired to blog well (as if my rested brain does it ‘well’) I’m recycling an old poem from a supposed former contributor. Here’s what I what once wrote:
“Today’s poetry comes to us from a former and continuing contributor to The Beautiful Stuff’s Poetry Anthology. Ms. Byrne has a knack for gripping the guts with her poetry and, as an almost graduated student at the University of Boulder, she is finding her way with a powerful voice in the world.
Elliana spends her days reading (sometimes for fun…most times for class), daydreaming, and writing. She studies English Lit and dabbles in short stories and poetry when possible. She enjoys life best curled up with a good book and her cat, Gil. You can read her work in last year’s anthology “No Small Things” (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1692331558/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1“
The truth is that I am Elliana Byrne. And I used the pen name because some of the poems I had written felt too visceral to put out into the world. But after having gone through this last year, I’ve realize life is nothing but visceral and I don’t have a problem trying to hide the gory truth of what it sometimes means to be human in all of our messy failings. So…please enjoy, and think about what masks you’ve worn, and if maybe, in light of these lives of ours being unbelievably short, if it’s time to take them off, and just be unapologetically you.
And now this:
Clean Slate
I want to wipe away the grievances of your skin and its heated strokes against mine and darken the unforgiving universes of your eyes that know and do not know me
But the treasonous mind casts wayward glances, over shoulders turned cold and the love and ache of wounds that should be healed over still echo in weakening heart beats
this disloyal heart casting out lines into currents that have battered the boards of my ship and sunk it deep, where it now lies desolate and quiet a tomb on the ocean floor waiting, in vain, for a tug of interest
treacherous and dissonant soul vibrating in time to the sound of yours even when the harmonic waves shake my teeth and dislodge my brain and seize my nerve endings
I will sit in this heavy deep and wait for reason or worse divinity to tell me how to clean you off by needle or by blade I will close my eyes, turn my back and huddle in to the shipwreck of me and cut lines until i bleed clean again
Hey kids. Today’s blog won’t be long or detailed. For the last three months, I’ve been engaged in trying to support and treat my youngest’s eating disorder on my own. Taking her to multiple appointments a week, doctors and therapists and dietitians. Monitoring every meal with her, coercing and begging her to eat. Lab work, consults, admissions to programs that turned out to be abusive…
I’m in the middle of it.
On Tuesday we admitted her to a better program. But it requires that I be here, in Denver, with her. Monitoring a few meals, learning better techniques, taking her in at 7 and not leaving the facility again until 7. They are long, hard days, filled with meetings and often a lot of tears over grilled cheese sandwiches. We’re lucky to have a space at the Ronald McDonald Charity house and it’s honestly been the biggest blessing. It isn’t home but they provide a safe place to be in the times we’re not in treatment.
This blog is just a reminder…that even on our hardest days and maybe especially on them, I want you, as a writer or poet, to remember the comfort and the break that your craft can be. Even a sentence a day counts. One stanza. A paragraph, a dialogue. Hell, a journal entry (man…I’ve never journaled so much in my life) can work wonders. These things can switch the tracks in your brain for just a few moments, bring you out of the chaos, and into a world you can control, into something brighter. Or make space to hold all of the hard thoughts you can’t put out into the world in the moment.
So that’s it, that’s the blog. Write. A little. Everyday. Use a hospital napkin, or the edge of that overpacked therapy schedule…doesn’t matter. Just stay connected to who you are, and that there are stories still to tell.
I don’t have much to say about this one. Today we’ll be in the hospital. Next week, a new world. In a month? Who knows. Every season feels like fall these day, minus the comfort of repose.
Confetti
Fall afternoon where asphalt splits the glory of some reticent nature apart and the contrived quaintness of our street twenty years-lived sits picturesque and soft
our voices are silent and our thoughts are loud and we are so alone, next to one another each a leaf fallen even as the confetti of mountain ash dances down like glitter the aftermath some big show we've just missed the end of a celebration we held no part in
Tomorrow we run more tests, tomorrow they measure you again to see the failure to thrive and the insistence of dying thin rather than living with anything over your bones but shivering skin
and the dark bark of trees reaches up to claw the blue skies and I hear you giggling from your stroller at the leaves of confetti just somewhere down our street
it echoes, this joy even as you stare sullen beside me, alone
Hey there. I see you. Staring, blank eyed, into your screen. Just a thousand more words. Just get this poem revised. Just submit to one more journal. Post one more eye-catching reel. Just call three more bookstores. Just, just, just, just…
It isn’t hard to get caught up in the loop of hustling for your art. And I don’t mean that’s always a bad thing. We care about our work. We love our work. We want to share and celebrate our work. This world has a variety of pathways to do that (an overwhelming and convoluted sphere in itself), but it often amounts to at least a part time job in itself. Beyond the writing, the poem-ing, the editing, the revision, our creativity is in constant competition for the pesky day-to-day of living.
Psh. Family. Day jobs. Grocery shopping. Cleaning. Taxes. PTA meetings. Board meetings. Bake sales. Yard work. Caregiving. That contest you said you’d judge. Simultaneous vaccinations for every furry thing in the house… everything competing for space in your brain and on your schedule. I get burnt out just thinking about it all. So this week, we’re going to take a step back, put down the balls I’m juggling (I can’t type balls without giggling a little–Jesus Christ Sarah, pull it together) and talk about some things we can do as creatives/writers to keep ourselves sane, calm, and focused, in these over productive lives. I think you guys deserve a bullet list. It’s been awhile.
Sleep. Protect your goddamn sleep at all costs. Seriously. Priding yourself on four hours a night is only super cool to tech bros and cocaine addicts (or do I repeat myself?) Create a bedtime routine like you were a toddler. We turn off our phones, we brush our teeth, we stretch and meditate, we read something calming, we shut off the light and we settle in. (or whatever combination works for you) Every night. Limit your caffeine and your booze.
Find time to write for fun. I get it, all of us write and it’s all ‘supposed’ to be fun. But sometimes there are projects and deadlines. You should always have some outlet that isn’t related to your bigger goals. Journaling every day counts. I have a tiny notebook and every day I sit down to write one poem in only the space of two tiny pages. Only have 5 minutes? Do that. That’s enough. Have 20? Take it and make it your downtime.
Exercise. Listen you don’t have to run marathons. You could to chair yoga or mobility stretches. You could go for a walk or a bike ride. You could Jazzercise for all I care, Richard Simmons your heart out. Power lift or join a Cross-Fit cult. The brain works better when the blood is flowing. Not only that, but it will kick up your endorphins and hopefully help your sleep, posture, and overall sense of well-being. Movement matters
Read. Holy shit, I used to be terrible about this! I’d only pick up a book at the end of the day, maybe make it through a page, and fall asleep. I told myself I didn’t have time. I was a big dumb liar. There is time in the day. I read in the morning now, and a little at lunch, and again in the afternoon. A variety, some philosophy, some writing books, some fiction. A healthy diet of words help me to have fuel for my own.
Don’t take it so seriously. I’m not talking about just your writing. I’m talking about your life. Here’s a secret that capitalism and social media doesn’t want you to know. The statuses, the Amazon ratings, the likes and comments–none of it really matters. It’s an alternate plane of information that really doesn’t mean anything. Have you ever sat in your own skin consciously for a minute. Felt the reality of being? Known that if a giant EMP took out all technology suddenly, you would still exist in the world. We only get this one time, we only get the moment and the breath we’re in. If you never published another book, the world would still keep spinning. If you were rejected 600 times, the sun would still rise the next day. Silly human, stop obsessing about the trivial and just be present. Find your joy in the here and now.
Well, there you go. Take care of yourself. Get sunshine, good food, movement, and water. Treat yourself like your favorite houseplant. Talk gently to yourself. Forgive yourself. Take lots of big, deep belly breaths, and trust that whatever you have to give for today, is more than enough.
Sarah Reichert Author 