April

Poet Spotlight On: Taylor Schwedux

Taylor Schwedux is an Australian self-taught artist and poet residing in Germany with her husband. Her journey  into writing began at a young age, during primary school, where creative writing was one of her favorite activities—even in her free time. Over the years, she transitioned from many creative writing mediums, through songwriting to poetry.

Do you have any rituals when you write?

I do actually! When I sit down to write and want to focus, I refill my water bottle or make a tea on the side to drink, listen to lo-fi kind of music or music that helps to conjure ideas. There are some on YouTube I’ve come across where it sounds like you’re writing in a moving train or at a café. During these times, I also set timers. I may do a 30-45 minute session like this, or sometimes I could go over 2 hours just writing, turning off all the timers because I’ve been really in the zone with it, and my mind is burning with ideas.

Are there any particular poets who inspired you to write poetry?

Upon the first few poems I wrote when I was 13-19 and reworked for the book, I was heavily influenced by William Shakespeare’s sonnets. I had a lot of schoolwork surrounding Shakespeare and his plays. Also, not to mention – Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde and Robert Frost.

What emotions are hardest for you to write about with great honesty?

As sad as this may sound, I find writing about happiness the hardest. Happiness to me is not always as universal as sadness or grief can be. When I’m sad, I find writing is the one thing I go to; when I am happy, I tend to live in that happy moment and not write about it was that made me happy.

Since a lot of your poetry seems to be autobiographical, does it ever worry you to share it with others?

Honestly, before publishing I had fears of being misunderstood for how different my life and upbringing is to a lot of people who never had that. It was the opposite for me, I felt a relief, as if weight was being lifted off my shoulders as I set my book out into the world. (Explain why I went ahead and published and why being misunderstood never stopped me).

I read a lot of poetry prior to it being published, especially more modern ones and seeing their works made me feel as though I can do this as well.

What does your first draft of a poem look like?

It definitely leans towards the messy type. I have poems written in my phone notes app, in a writing book, on my PC notes and even at times, scraps of paper If my phone isn’t near me. Thankfully, I keep my scraps of paper in a plastic sheet and go through it as soon as I can , rewriting what I wrote into my book.

When do you usually feel inspiration strike?

Inspiration can strike for me at any time, and sometimes being 3am, in the middle of being in a deep sleep needing to quickly write something on my phone notes. Sometimes when I’m out and about, something may catch my eye or I hear someone say something I will write it down and also a tiny description of what happened, what I heard or saw; to help with documentation of the inspiration.

If you could seal any one line from a poem in a message in a bottle, what would it be?

I think the poem “Dreams”  from Langston Hughes is what I’ll seal into a bottle.
“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly…”

Fire With Fire

To fight fire with fire,
Or to extinguish the flame?
Oh, how I love to play this dangerous game— Me against the dancing blaze.
I feed my sorrow to the embers, Watch them crackle, twist, and grow, As the fire slowly learns what it needs to know.
To fight fire with fire
Or to extinguish the flame?
Perhaps it’s this question,
That’s bound me to this game.

-Taylor Schwedux

Isabelle Palerma

Restored Sight/Rediscovery: a Poem

A prompt from a.r. rogers:

“If I gave in to my free will today…”

It’s easy to think someone else
is the master of our circumstances –
a puppeteer
and we’re marionettes, strings tugged on.
But if I were in charge
of my own strings for a change,
perhaps I would cross a few things off
my list – not my to-do list,
but my bucket list.

Instead of going grocery shopping,
I’d go zip lining in the jungle.
Instead of writing poetry in my room,
I’d be performing it on a stage.
Instead of being a coward,
I’d be brave.
Instead of loving,
I’d make love in the rain.

I never wished to be hollow.
I never wished to be empty.
& yet, somewhere along the way,
I lost sight of free will, and I gave my keys
to a different master.
Somewhere along the way, I surrendered
myself and nobody found the heart
to tell me
I could be anything I want.
I just need to rediscover my free will.

This is the beginning of restored sight.
The start of a rediscovery.

I’m giving in to my free will today.

Isabelle Palerma

Unmoored: a Poem

A prompt from Maureen Thorson.

“Write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”

A date etched into my heart as though
carved into glass.
My eyes were stained with tears, and
I turned to a notebook,
searching for answers about
why God robbed the world of ordinary men
who did their best to love.
I bled ink onto the page as I struggled
for truth
the night no one remembered as
a young lost princess became unmoored.

Isabelle Palerma

A Ghost for all Eternity: a Short Fiction

SEBASTIAN



I drive. I drive in search of you. I drive to forget you. Most of my passengers don’t speak. Silence is both a miracle and a plague. Both holy and evil.

I don’t speak either.

It is what it is.

One morning, I had a passenger who had eyes like you. They were brown swirled with cinnamon. I didn’t believe she was you, but I hoped.

I try. I try to forget you. My heart hurts. When I think about you, it aches. You once told me, “Sebastian, you’re too dramatic”. But now, you’re gone.

And the world is empty.

My sentences are short because I don’t know the language. I know grief is a language all its own – one I am fluent in. You spoke much better than me. I have pain I cannot find words for.

This country was your home. I live in this foreign land, hoping to find you everywhere I look. You are nowhere.

I am nobody in love with a ghost.

Photo via cottonbro studio



I think about your calling me dramatic and picture an actor on a stage. Life is a tragedy with no direction. Grief is a rock in my stomach that weighs more than love ever did. Love was buoyancy and lightness. Levity and joyousness. A balloon. Not a stone.

All of my clocks are stuck on the date I lost you, Annalise, February 10, 2020. It was a Monday.

Lunedí – that’s how you say Monday in my language. It sounds like sadness and eyelashes frozen with tears. But you can’t hear my voice. I wish I knew how to reset my clocks, so they, too, would remain frozen at 6:28, but they press onward.

And I know you would tell me to move on too, but I can’t.

Moving on means forgetting.

I refuse to forget you, Annalise.

You’re in every flower I pick, every passenger I drive to their mundane lives, every song lyric I hear, every tattoo I ink into my skin.

You are everywhere and nowhere all at once.

I guess this is what love means.

My heart belonging to a ghost for all eternity.

Photo via Zarina Khalilova

ANNALISE


Sebastian, Sebastian, I hear you cry my name in the middle of the night when everyone else sleeps. Your tongue lazy with exhaustion, thick with the fumbling of foreign vowels and consonants, the words you have struggled with for six-and-a-half years.

I know you don’t blame me for being gone, but I feel like a ghost, the way my memory haunts you. I watch you toss and turn at night, dear Sebastian. I see how you refuse to take our pictures off the walls. You haven’t yet made peace with my absence, but I am gone now and you have to let me go.

Photo via Marina Utrabo



You still sleep with my pillow and I have heard you say it still smells of my shampoo, but Sebastian, dear Sebastian, the years press on and you must let go.

You look so aimless since I’ve been gone, wandering around this city, your eyes wide as you take everything – and nothing – in all at once. I want to apologize to you over and over, but I’ve done nothing wrong.

I was walking late at night, I’ll admit that. It was dark out, yes, and my coat, too, was black, but Sebastian, I was in a crosswalk, I had the right of way.

I know you’re not from here, my love, but it was a red light, that didn’t mean for that driver to speed up, you’ve driven in the city before, you know that means to slow, to stop. She hurried, thinking she could beat the light; instead, it was my body she beat, merciless, as metal against flesh often is.

Sebastian, dear Sebastian, please just let me go.

end.

Isabelle Palerma

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.