Good morning pals!
If you’re reading this, thanks for joining me on this blogging journey. Here’s a fun update: yesterday Issue 8 of Acropolis Journal went live, which includes my poem “Michael must be a Libra which makes us fundamentally incompatible.” It’s a mouthful, I know, and I always get a bit nervous submitting poems with a whole sentence as the title. But! The folks over at Acropolis called it “gorgeously long” so I know I’m not the only one who loves a long title, even if my reasons are related to mid-2000s pop emo brainrot.
I hope you’ll check it out, and read through the other great pieces in the issue. Content warning for the above poem: self-harm and suicidal ideation, which are…not uncommon themes in the rest of my work if you feel like checking that out too.
This one is particularly dark imo, and is an attempt at describing the flavor of hopelessness that happens when you don’t know how to live but you don’t know how to die either. That limbo is a difficult place to be, and I imagined it as a kind of bargain with various stewards of life, death, and the afterlife.
Initially, I was thinking of self-harm as a tradeoff, as a slow death instead of a fast one, small sacrifices that eventually add up. Cuts and scars as small and light as feathers, which of course made me think of the motif of weighing the soul or heart at death common in so many mythologies. The title combines a couple of these, referring to the archangel Michael, angel of death, and modern astrology–which might have as much to say about our deaths as our births, yes? I’m honestly not sure, but at the end of the day I think the purpose of faith is to give us something to look forward to in the face of difficult times. It seems it’s always difficult times, and I don’t know that I have much faith in either Michael or the stars, but if there’s something out there in this big ol’ universe of ours I suppose we’ll all meet it eventually.
Thanks for reading along! I’ve got some more work forthcoming soon that I’m excited to share with y’all, so keep an eye out :)
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