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 deep longing for home — not just as a place, but as a feeling.”
This rampant desire seizes a deep part of me like breath (nearly as important as the inhalation/exhalation my lungs have been known to practice daily).
I have searched for belonging in places, in persons unfamiliar as though the answers would simply arrive. I grew up in a house that was beautiful, but I felt like I was sleeping in hotel paper.
I have sought something deeper than the flimsy doilies and brocade curtains. Something I could place more value in than porcelain dolls purchased for me (without a single consideration into my interests, my passions).
I have wished for something that birthday candles could not even begin to scratch the surface of.
If I told you, perhaps you’d laugh. An orphan does not have a family, you would remind me, as I introduce you to my mother and father, my brothers and their wives, the grandmothers and grandfathers, all the cousins and aunts and uncles. Poverty does not look like all of this.
(Then, why did I feel so empty?)
Homelessness does not come when you have shelter, a roof over your head.
(Butthen, explain why I only found a home when I found someone who loves me unconditionally.)
Isabelle Palerma 