April is for Poets

it’s national poetry month for three more hours, let me be nostalgic about writing poems pls & ty

I think being a poet is a little bit like being an artist in the sense that there’s not much you can do about it—you either are one, or you’re not. Like being an artist, you’re a poet even if you’re not writing poems at the moment. Even if you’re in the middle of an endless lull of words. You might even be one and not know it, yet. Or maybe you just don’t believe it.

In high-school I wrote angsty tortured poems in my journals and sketchbooks. I have a box with poems written on folded lined paper. I didn’t think I was a poet, that was just how words came out. After high-school, I had a decade long poetry lull. (Although to be fair during this period I completed several projects that are arguably poems, or at least poem-adjacent.)

In 2018, in the throes of an unexpected and all consuming lust for someone (/something) that didn’t make any sense, suddenly the only way words would come out of me were in poem-like lists.

I’ve never been a poet, but now poems are just surfacing out of me.
(Sure, they’re not good, and I’ll never show them to anyone, but still.)

I’m scared.
I don’t know what this thing is between us,
this gravity.
Like a mattress with a dimple in the middle, and I can’t help rolling back towards your body.
Like a marble circling a drain.

Poetry fell into my life like a lifeline, and I grabbed on tight. I wrote everyday, epically messy poem-lists that were nearly 1,000 words long. There were a lot of cliches and wholly uninspired words, but there were enough good things there for me to hold onto, keep writing. More than that, when I wrote, it was like everything around my quieted down. My fingers moved faster over the keyboard than I could think, and so many times I wrote something I didn’t even know I felt until it was there in front of me, blinking on the screen.

I’m dissolving and have been for a long time.
A chunk of salt in the bottom of a vessel
filled with the kind of liquid
that’s always falling from the sky.

One day soon I will be a jar of saltwater,
raintears,
lid screwed on tight so I can’t evaporate,
but dear God, please, let me evaporate.

I’m sick of being charming. I’m sick of
saying how my weekend went when all I did
was work more and not get kissed by anyone,
or touched, or
looked at even.

I went to slam poetry events in crowded living rooms, slowly added slim volume after slim volume to the small stack of poetry collections on my bookshelf. I wandered the poetry aisle of Powell’s and pulled books out at random. Read entire volumes aloud to myself. I crowded into into the lobby of the Ace Hotel Portland, listening to Morgan Parker and ten other poets read and I thought, this is where I’m supposed to be.

Of course that thought was immediately followed by a rush of insecurity and fear so deep that I pushed the certainty back down. But at least I kept writing. I stacked up words. Wrote about crushes, and heartbreak, and longing for something I didn’t know the name of. I wrote about the endless cycle of losing myself and finding myself.

I kept writing and I didn’t stop writing, really. Now I’m five years into this upward swell of writing poems. I’ve gotten better at writing them. I’ve gotten better at editing them, too. (Having a partner with an MFA in poetry helps with the editing part.) Mostly, writing poems still feels like it did in 2018. Like it’s sometimes the only way words will come out of me. Even if they’re just lists, even if I don’t think they’re really poems, I know better now.

A poem for April 2024:

Character Study

it’s like,
the drain at the bottom
of me has been unplugged
everything is gone, how the
curtains billowed out, how
I felt on my bike on the water
the clips of video loaded one
after the other after the other
proving something
the flowers crushed under my body
my body! my body is gone, all
the hair I’ve trimmed
crescent fingernail clippings,
hickeys kissed up my throat
all gone
it’s like, someone forgot
to turn on the tap and
fill me back up
plug the drain, get some calories
in this body, put me under
a new sky on unsteady legs
turn everything upside down
and see how I do with my
lefts turned to rights
it’s like, trying to build a
whole new person with
no plans, blind curve
after blind curve

---

Xo

B