The Upside of Writing

Hi everyone! 

So it’s been ages. I’m finally getting my creative life together and trying to maintain a writing blog again. I’m moving this show over to wordpress at https://amandanemecek.home.blog/ if you’d like to check it out! My goal is to have weekly updates of more edited poetry and prose.

Please consider following me over there if you’re still interested in my writing!

You have suns in your eyes –

one around each pupil.

Sometimes I feel like

I’ve only got one foot in this world;

the other is off somewhere,

and so wonderful.

It will send you love, too,

I am sad.

I am sad,

and I stay in bed

and eat very litte, or else eat in excess.

I cry;

not big, shuddering sobs

but a quiet, steady stream

of salt water and snot.

I am sad,

and I am sedentary. Until suddenly, I am not,

and I go outside

and breath in the fresh air

and marvel in my movement. I will cycle through,

many times again,

but I will always end up here:

moving, in the fresh air,

I asked the wall

How do I even begin?

and the wall whispered back

She set me down

on the table,

a pumpkin,

and she coated her fingers with

“I’m sorry”

Before she set to work

Scooping me out. Each finger –

“I’m sorry” –

Diving into my heart again

and again and again.

She left me hollow

so that she could carve whatever face

she wanted me to where that day.

Here is where she’ll make her stand

With unbowed head and upheld hand Where butterflies and fragile things

Unfurl their thunder gilded wings And all will wonder near and far

How one can fail to heed her call She will proceed throughout the land

Maybe I just want to be more

Than all the flaws I’ve painted

Between my shoulder blades

We must begin.

Again,

And again,

And again, a million times over,

A trillion – as many times as it takes.

We will greet the new day

With that same old sun

In these same old bodies.

We need not be grateful.

That may come later –

will come later –

If we just begin.            

Again. And again.

It is 5 in the morning

and I

(again)

am awake. Yesterday, it was 4.

Today it is 5.

Tomorrow, perhaps, it will be 6. I don’t know why

I keep doing this. (I am lying to myself.

I know why.

love breeds love i whispered

into the void

at the edge of my lungs one echoed voice screamed back

only hate knew that art

of self-perpetuation i chose to ignore

I looked into Winter’s eyes

as if it isn’t a bit of a miracle

The trees cry dewdrops

in the blue dark of morning.

They are shadows,

indistinguishable from one another.

The birds rest in their gnarled arms.

The birds are humming.

They do not have lips.

They stretch out their rigid tongues –

five bones each –

to catch dewdrops falling

from tree and cloud alike. I want to ask them:

“how?”

I want to ask them:

Dear women: you are

allowed to be imperfect.