In March of 2009, the poet Rachel McKibbens introduced the poetry community to the concept of the “ghost line”. McKibbens defines the ghost line as “an inspiring line or image that becomes the unseen first line of a poem”.
The poet Ollie Schminkey provided their readers with a poetry prompt on April 9, 2025.
The prompt is as follows:
Use a line of a lyric from a song you have been listening to as a ghost line.
i:softening
Before they exhume our bodies from this cold hard earth, I will make a subtle plea, begging you to quiet that nest you have woven in your skull. (Silence the birds or hornets or whomever comes to roost in the twigs and branches there.)
Before they dig our bodies from this cemetery ground, I will make a hushed demand. Relax your body beside me. Your skeleton is crafted of exquisite granite, but I remember when it was bone. Soften, my love, and be still.
Photos via Cottonbro Studio
ii: out-of-focus romance
This twig and branch nest sculpture is home to a part of me I have never named. Creatures who blur the edges of memory when a lover is involved. (It’s not that I don’t remember – it just becomes out-of-focus like a dream.)
This is what happens when you have been raised on tawdry romances and inescapable dreams.
Photos via Yaroslav Shuraev, Daria Liudnaya, & Natalia Naitkevich.
iii:love extinguished
These wraiths might not catch breath as they dance along cobblestone, but, so long as I am here with you, my love, none of the rest matters.
I have diaries scrawled with messages of love, dedicated to the creatures who have blurred the edges of my memories.
Yet I watch the apparitions and know the truth. I have you, and you have me. (We are here among tombstones, and love like ours cannot be extinguished.)
Photo via Skylar Kang Photo via Tanmay Ghosh Photo via Yi Ren
“A term invented by author Gregory Venvonis to describe the devotion to positive spiritual growth amid underlying darkness.”
Though the glimmer might be eradicated (from time to time), it is always capable of shining again. Though it can be hard to see when cloaked in midnight, your mind is capable of fabricating untruths like a ruthless politician or an adversary.
(It’s why we tried to give the enemy a name – to make him easier to talk about then just an abstract concept.)
But the boulder that buries itself on top of you, smothering your breathing and swallowing your light, is also capable of eroding.
It might feel like centuries have passed you by, but just know – after every winter, we see flowers blossom.
You, too, will blossom again. I will resurrect from this darkness and discover my light from within. (Even if I have to excavate my soul like some damned archeological dig.)
It’s too easy to surrender, but we’ll fight through the frost, push past the sparrows’ wings that beat furiously against our bones, and surmount our devils.
(The ones we have named and even the anonymous ones who prefer to cower in the darkest places inside us.)
“A feeling best described as sorrow that has no clear cause.”
We thought by giving him a name, it couldn’t break me so badly, but the agony still extinguishes the illumination within my irises, within my pupils, within my soul. There is a darkness deeper than I care to admit, but I cannot hide from forever. (My fire has not ignited in days, yet I cannot hide in bed and relinquish myself to the shadows completely.)
I swore to myself I would not drown in thoughts such as these, but sometimes, the devastations are greater than I can control.
It sometimes feels as though I am caught in a riptide, the ocean current pulling me away from everyone who loves me until all they are is a speck of sand, a memory.
(My honesty is raw, my words are plain. I usually hide behind an ornate metaphor crafted carefully and I tread with caution – not to overstep the boundary lines.)
I have picked up the pen several times, but the ink well is dry and my thoughts crystallize like honey thickening as it cools. Nothing makes sense when the demons take the reins & I try to swallow the bile down.
I try to offer a courageous smile, but I feel weak and collapsing is the only option I have sometimes.
Don’t judge me for the anguish I carry. Each one is a sparrow beating its wings inside my chest, desperate to be released but finding a home buried deep in my rib cage alongside that dimly burning crystal that is a barely beating heart.
(I cannot swallow for all the feathers that have climbed from my chest to my throat, from my throat to the wet insides of my mouth.)
So, instead, with this inexplicable sadness, I lie here, my heart – my sparrows – knocking against my chest (an unspoken tragedy bearing down on me).
Alfred just recently shared with me a reader review which I feel entitled to share a part of with you all before including his interview. A reader of Alfred’s poetry had said the following:
The candor of this review honestly speaks volumes about Alfred Gremsly’s poetry, and while I am just starting to familiarize myself with his poetry, I can tell he has the same intentions I do with my writing and my day job – to provide a voice to communities normally stigmatized.
Alfred Gremsly is an American born poet who writes about mental health and the struggle that comes with it. A lifelong sufferer of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses, Alfred began writing poetry at the young age of twelve as a means of escaping his own mind.
Whose poetry style is most like your own?
I don’t know if anyone’s poetry is like mine. I don’t read a lot of poetry, and if I do read, it’s going to be something that’s complete opposite of what I write.
Have you received formal training for writing? If so, what’s your background? If not, what got you interested in poetry writing?
I started writing around age 12; I was a very depressed kid. We lived in the country and had nothing to do, and so, I would make homemade books for myself of my thoughts and feelings.
Who are some of your favorite poets?
Some individual poets I like to read are Jan Serene, Ashley Jane, Angie Waters, Margie Watts, and Sarah Kay Collie.
How do you feel when you’re writing a poem? Is it cathartic or do you find it draining? What types of emotions do you experience when writing poetry?
As I, myself, am a lifetime sufferer of depression and anxiety, I have extreme highs and lows. Unfortunately, it takes being in those extreme lows in order for me to get out what I’m needing to say.
I sometimes feel as if writing is a curse of sorts – so horrible would be the feelings and emotions I’m under while writing.
A lot of my poetry features fractured versions of myself as a narrative voice. What subjects do you write about and how are they influenced by your own experiences?
I write about what I’ve been through in life’s journey – my struggles with mental illness, the feelings of being mentally ill. I have overcome a lot through in life through poetry. I now have a grasp on my depression and anxieties, and I’m now on a mission to help others suffering from mental illnesses.
Am I just pretending there are voices in my head? And can anyone else hear a single thing they’ve said? Am I really talking to someone who has been talking back to me? Or have I just become a psychotic mystery? Life’s no fun pretending when you need a friend and a therapist is not the answer when you want the words to end. Can anyone hear the voices that are screaming from my head? I’ll be dead before I’m better ifI’m not already dead
Eryn lives in South Germany with their family but is originally from Oxford, UK. They work freelance as a translator and a teacher. When not writing, they’re out on their bike in the forest or dreaming up new ideas to write about. They are obsessed with vinyl, fountain pen ink, dragons and cheese. Preferably not all together. Their current favourite thing is spring blossoms against the white clouds. They are working on two new poetry collections which will be released this year, Masquerade Me and Death by Sugar, and two fiction works, a Dystopian Scifi novella called The Dust Collector and a Gothic Horror called The Black Cat Bookshop.
As a huge fan of your book, which features illuminating poetry on PTSD, I feel like I have to address that. How did you overcome your initial fears and write about a topic that is still so taboo in so many places?
I didn’t want to write something hard, or dark, and I really didn’t want to write a poetry collection that is largely autobiographical. But I found that on occasion when I shared an individual poem, that people really resonated with it. I saw that there’s a lot of poetry about anxiety and depression, but hardly anything for PTSD. And ultimately, sometimes, it is on you to begin it. It was on me to say, this is what PTSD looks like. So it became a collection. It was, and I think will remain, the most difficult collection for me to complete and publish. But I don’t regret it.
Do you sit down with a poetry idea in mind or does it slowly develop as you sit in front of the page or monitor? In other words, what is your process?
I should probably mention that I am an aphant, which means that I have no visual landscape. I cannot conjure a memory and play it back as if it is in glorious technicolour. If someone asks me to imagine a box, I cannot see the colour or texture. I see a nondescript box. So when it comes to poetry, you could say that I am a blind poet.
My visual landscape is layered with music notes and quantum physics. I hear a concept of a poem, a shiver of something, and I have to follow it through to the end. It happens a lot with a phrase, an overhead conversation, perhaps, and then I have to chase the thread to the end. I do not always know where it will turn up.
It’s cliché, but each person’s answer is uniquely their own: what is the best writing advice you have received?
Don’t lose your own poetic voice.
What are three words you would use to describe your poetry?
Lyrical Layered Whimsical
Why do you write poetry?
I have been writing poetry since I was 16, and really, have never stopped. I never intended to make something from it, I never intended to call myself a poet. I studied both poetry and playwriting at University but poetry was the one that survived the grind of assignments, of life getting in the way, and it kept coming back. I write poetry because I need to write it. It is cathartic, somehow.
Is there a common motif in your writing that you find yourself returning to?
There are a few, yes.
In Of Swans and Stars I explored the ideas of my own North Star, that place that calls you home, the direction on the compass that we follow. So swans and stars, are very important to me, and you see amber, being cast in amber, featuring often. I write a lot about Druidry, mythology and folklore. Dragons will always be in my poetry. But at the heart of it all, is always love. Love for who we are, for where we have been, and where we are going.
If you could attend a poetry writing conference taught by any author, lyricist, poet, etc., living or dead, which two to three people would you choose and why?
Larkin. I love him, I love how he writes, his raw energy. Peter Gabriel. His wordsmithery is without equal. WH Auden. I want to hear him read and see how it is reflected in his eyes. I want to see how he writes.
A thousand cranes Paper art flying For peace in the world A thousand cranes Countless painstaking Paper folds For peace in the heart A thousand cranes Flying their dance On white string For peace in the eyes A thousand cranes Quiet time Each repetition A healing caress For peace in the soul A thousand cranes Origami sorcery Peace in the world Starts with ourselves.
Isabelle Palerma 