February is the month of resilience, reflection, regrowth. When the winter starts to lose its grip on the world, when we thaw out of the dreariness of depression, and remember the importance of love. Loving others, loving yourself, and loving what you do.
Here is a collection of what I love to do, which is writing, and I hope you enjoy the poems I have curated as much as I enjoyed making them.
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Molar and Pistil
Winter has teeth,
feral for freckled flesh,
fresh blooms,
frog legs,
honeysuckle,
throats full of birdsong,
thoraxes of crickets who counted too high,
wet leaves hiding growing things,
petrichor,
sunbeams sliding through sheets of gray,
Winter is bared to the world that wants it to be put down,
like tulip bulbs, entombed far down into the earth, left to lie with the fossils,
to be taunted by the hum of hearts breaking open from hibernation,
tormented by unbalanced caterwaul of muscles unhinging from their comatose state.
But it must prowl, it must hunt and sink its molars into defiance because without it,
those who wake from their spells will come to matchstick forests,
mourners in the morning,
murky ponds.
Winter has teeth,
to shepherd life on.
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For the Cursed
Lunar eclipse between my hips, change is all we know,
women are seasons too,
Spring,
Winter,
Bloom and Snow.
Foundation,
Recreation,
Curse and Cure,
people would think we are in torment,
condemned to cycles of hell, unaware of the strength we wield.
Tempests restrained in our cells.
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Aphrodite
I am the tomb
treasure
triumph
temple, of men.
Worship the feet I walk on, for they have waded through Time.
Your wives, daughters, daydreams shall hide their faces from the light,
pray they don't fall into my line of sight,
for love hurts the most
when it is lost.
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Honeycomb
Flesh dripped in milk and honey,
awash golden by the silk and the money
of the morning light that sobers the mind from the night’s lunacy,
plagues of dreams evaporating,
freckles can’t wait to invest,
seeding caches of sunbeams into cells
unveiling new marks like stars in the sky,
by constellations creating a beautiful design.
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Origin Story
I am a dilapidated house forgotten in the forest,
the storms I have weathered no longer a secret,
splintered walls bared against the sylvan
that have already infiltrated my vulnerabilities,
tainting my body with blooms that taunt me with their roots threading the needle
one root at a time.
Throngs of ivy that had once sutured thresholds of the rooms I had played in
now run ravenous, feral for the floorboards,
where I rose with such purpose so long ago,
choking out memories with their ringlets,
digging into the decay,
unraveling more and more,
barring me from the sunlight the birdsong,
canvassing my body without an apology.
I am a house,
a rune of humanity,
tainting life’s archives with vulgarity.
A temple for wraiths who were born hungry for existence,
extinguishing animals,
rivers,
stories,
seas,
forests, never fires, weeding, raking, burning, breaking down the weakest links
and using their broken bodies for trophies.
I am the coffin of a disaster.
I am foundation for the hope
of a better future.
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Thank you for reading this month’s recap. I look forward to see what March and spring brings!
It makes so much sense for february to be the time of resilience as it follows the footsteps of the sort of shock-stillness and overwhelm of January.
The ferocity of your poetry is nothing but admirable!