Tag: #poetry

• Telephone Booth

  A pumpkin garland is strung on the wall

  above my makeshift bed

  In my telephone booth of a closet

  hangers shrug under fleece-lined armor

  The trees outside rain down their colors

  on all my crumpled leaf days

  Calendar pages pile

  in a hand-me-down metal drawer

  I didn’t imagine October in this room,

  the chill meeting me as I am

  Often, I am still a sad blowing pine needle

  with Charlie Brown in my pocket

  But a few golden leaves have stumbled

  into this telephone booth with me

  And suddenly

  there is an abundance of space

  -A.J

  October 30, 2025

  #poem, #poetry

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• Kintsugi

  When the paper wings

  of desk letters marked “To: Future Me”

  start to thin,

  I become the kitchen cabinet,

  my rib cage bearing each memory

  as timeless stone.

  One teacup waits in the back,

  still warm with

  khaki skirt prayers

  we poured into our tree.

  The plate remembers

  how we shared girlhood,

  passed doorway I love yous

  like dinner rolls.

  The serving bowl cradles

  our familiar—

  rhythmic leash clicks,

  couch cushion rituals.

  At seventeen,

  I know only porcelain

  can hold these gentle stories,

  slip from child fingers,

  and wear their fissures:

  Gray spiderwebs threaded in

  the fur of my dog’s eyes,

  overexposed polaroids

  of a girl fading into new frames,

  my sister’s light

  spilling into apartment blinds,

  faint homesickness leaching

  through my purple walls.

  But like how paper must crease

  to find its folding,

  every break

  brings us closer to restoration.

  At seventeen,

  I am learning to brush the tears

  from these rims

  and welcome the gold.

  -A.J

  April 30, 2025

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• The Dandelions Are Women

  There is a gathering of parachute

  dandelions in your backyard,

  just beyond your picket fence of freedom.

  Some grow defiantly, others

  worship the darkness, a shadow of a boot.

  You pluck one that might be your

  mother/sister/daughter because

  to blood-stained gloves they are all weeds,

  blow her hopes to the wind of men,

  justify the sacrifice with

  “I made a wish to protect the

  dandelion seeds.” When really,

  I want to steal her water and light.

  Your wish for life is herbicide

  that poisons every flower and every seed.

  Now there are only broken stems—

  the unbound dreams little girls

  used to chase in fields

  now lie crushed

  just beyond your picket fence of teeth.

  But do not forget: we are

  wild, resilient flowers that thrive

  in barren ground.

  -A.J

  November 14, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• What Seventeen Knows

  No knife’s edge is sharper than

  being Seventeen: A threshold

  in the gray of November.

  Last night my friends

  came over for Halloween,

  and in between projector screenings

  of The Office and

  passing out candy to kids who are

  not yet berated for their differences,

  the reenactment of our childhoods

  was cut short by the collective

  whisper of “politics.”

  And we are scared in the way

  only the hunted can be.

  Scared because we know how

  we would bubble in the ballot,

  perfectly and without any

  erase marks,

  learned from years of standardized

  tests, yet our pencils don’t find

  contact.

  And we have voices, too.

  I cannot vote for my sister,

  my mother, myself,

  (God forbid our lives are in danger.)

  for my LGBTQ+ friends

  who made no “choice” in their loving,

  (“Love your neighbor as yourself”)

  for the students not unlike me

  who died from the bullets

  of an AR-15.

  (But we’re pro-life, right?)

  And we matter.

  We remember November 9, 2016

  all too well.

  The school hallways lingered with

  an unspoken sadness, and a

  great fear crept into many a

  child’s chest.

  Even then, we knew what it meant.

  And we don’t want to go back

  to those “great” times.

  Please, I don’t want to wake up

  next week

  to the same defeat in my

  parents’ voices by my bedside,

  to the morning news on TV

  promising to uproot our

  childhoods,

  rights,

  lives.

  Please America, vote for us.

  For all the seventeen year olds

  in November who know more than

  you assume,

  whose knowledge isn’t dependent

  on their parents’,

  who have read the headlines and

  heard the hatred that threatens to

  split apart Thanksgiving

  dinner tables,

  but who are not quite old enough

  to have any real say.

  We promise you one thing: We won’t

  accept this version of America.

  -A.J

  November 1, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• “All Men Are Created Equal”

  I wonder if when the founding fathers of a

  nation of forgotten mothers

  wrote that line with a dipped quill pen,

  they pondered the constrictive nature of the

  three-letter-word “Men.”

  “Men,” only half of “women,” yet

  in our history’s fraying tapestry, when

  patriarchy was taught in homes and digested by

  society, the “w-o” was shoved

  to fit, invisible and silent, beside their letters.

  Our letters, drowned in black ink to

  create space for their pompous calligraphy.

  Today it seems as though history has held

  its stubborn ground.

  Yes, All Men are created equal.

  They sit on their tired iron thrones, equal in

  height, and justify age-old papers that forgot

  to grant women their inherent rights.

  The bloodied scraps of freedom we have, torn

  and stitched by sisters who endured the

  worst and bared their teeth, so easily stripped

  away by Men who have never known what it is

  to truly seethe; to have “Justices” control

  their bodies; to be voiceless; to not be believed.

  No, not all women are created equal,

  that much is clear. Though we are equal in our

  anger, and a new document we will steer.

  We will not form it in hope of revenge

  for all the suited, bigoted men,

  but rather in the hope that when we scrawl

  “equal” with our glitter gel pens, it will

  mean it this time.

  And when we sign it,

  Women everywhere,

  the “W” and “o” will be their own letters.

  -A.J

  October 15, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• Half-Finished Poems

  I continue to write my heart out

  on pages that feel like the friendship bracelets

  I keep in a glass jar.

  So I will say it again here

  in different words, in broken stanzas,

  because I have not felt

  whole since we were small and intact.

  I miss you, but not the you

  that exists without me.

  It has been a child’s day

  since I’ve spoken to the girl attached.

  Who else will play Elphaba

  to my Glinda in living room renditions

  of “What Is This Feeling?”

  All I want is to give her my sweetest

  strawberries at lunch

  and to fall asleep talking in her teal bedroom.

  I would give our shared moon

  to bicker with her again

  over childish things I cannot remember.

  But now she exists with someone else,

  and there are no more music videos to produce,

  no more ripe strawberries to give.

  So I will keep baring my heart in

  poems that feel only half-finished.

  -A.J

  August 26, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• I Want To Carry The Words

  I want to carry the words

  that read small on paper

  but leave the deepest impressions on people.

  The persistent words found on

  shower curtains and bedroom ceilings,

  their scrawled letters absorbing

  into wet skin

  and flickering in darkness.

  I want to carry the words

  rarely gifted to me like golden stars and

  the ones spoken to me in abundance.

  I want to carry these profound words

  because they are strung together by people

  who give them meaning,

  and I am carried by their ink.

  -A.J

  July 11, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• The Protector

  He is not usually recognized

  for his searching the sidewalk—sorry,

  I meant his sidewalk.

  Before I leave, I tilt open the blinds

  because he cannot.

  And when I return, I watch him watch.

  His lion mane, in all its canine irony,

  shines golden

  in the waning light of the afternoon.

  He turns his graying head

  suddenly, and looks with an intensity

  that cannot be broken by my mere

  presence.

  When he barks in alarm, his breath

  fogging the foyer pane,

  It is no surprise there is a lowly cat

  intruding too close into his kingdom.

  After all, what is a pet if not

  the protector

  of his protectors?

  -A.J

  June 16, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• Phantom Tree

  Their recollections haze and blur

  like the strokes of a wet brush when I

  am not painted into the picture.

  I am one of the phantom trees,

  never really in the forest

  but alive through artistic assumption.

  I will define the wood with my

  sharpest shadows if it means I will

  be remembered even in absence.

  Will your light touch me then?

  -A.J

  May 17, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

  ---

• The Kaleidoscope

  There was an empty desk

  beside mine on the first day.

  I didn’t notice the

  kaleidoscope that was always

  there in my palm until

  the alphabetized

  reminder of her absence.

  I saw through its glass the

  distorted what-ifs of

  a town enlarged with her in it.

  In tinted shards I was never

  alone at tables,

  never behind on sidewalks,

  never holding to my eye what

  would have been.

  We were supposed to be

  at the center of it all,

  but now I have nothing to clutch

  that is real.

  Her name was called

  to the stage, and then mine,

  because the seating chart

  on the last day

  was in alphabetical order.

  But then I moved the mirrors

  from my line of sight

  and saw the sobering blues

  that come with being on

  the wrong side.

  -A.J

  April 25, 2024

  #poem, #poetry

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