Nobody ever taught me the rules, yet it seems like everyone else was given some kind of handbook to follow.
I don’t even know if I have the same pieces or even a game board.
I’m still circling back to square one, trying to understand where I am and why I’m here. The rules of the game were never explicit, and yet everyone else knows how to follow them.
I’m lost as usual, searching for something, some kind of footing, some kind of grounding, but it isn’t a puzzle where you just slide a piece in and it interlocks.
Nothing makes sense. Like I said, I’m lost as usual, and I’m stuck searching for a rulebook, some kind of handbook to follow.
From a place where a house feels less like home and more like a museum. From a mother whose voice pierced and a father who used a belt to prove himself. From sibling rivalry and brothers who were class clown and golden. From a place where I was simultaneously never enough & too much. From a place where I was silenced, so a pen became my voice. From a place where I used metaphor to express thought because reality hit too close to home. From a place where a house never felt like a home.
As April startsGlobal Poetry Writing Month, I figured I’d kick off the month with a poem of my own. The prompt comes from raeonpaper:
the moon’s yearning whisper.
The deterioration of her internal language results in an abject pleading, a fullness only seen from behind the gauze of cloud, the thin of cloth, the shape of pregnancy. A moon’s desolate murmur.
She speaks in a low tone, too soft for most, yet those who listen know.
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.)
Isabelle Palerma 