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Haibun with Dog Saint

Laika looks up to the sky, a shooting star branded down her snout. She has been trained for this sacrifice. She is ready to die among the vacuum. She will sit still while her world shakes her to the heavens. She will be brave and only whimper as she starts to starve. Her brown eyes will appear in the punctuation of manifestos, and stained at the bottom of mugs left behind by discussion. Laika, svyatoy progressa, show us the way.

Negro Matapacos looks forward, to the enemy, blood tied round his neck. His teeth gleam yellow like fat. He will be brave, and growl while he rips and tears, fur like body armor. He will not whimper when kicked, but go again for the ankles. His black paws will fall with boots, with sneakers and chanclas in a riot, and run with the beats of hand drums and hiphop. Negro Matapacos, santa de la violencia, show us the way.

Guinefort looks down to the child, ribs like a home. She will slay the viper, and bloody her teeth. She will remain brave, wrapped around her charge, while she is slaughtered. She will seem fierce, quiet in death like in life, with her snout resting on long paws. Her grey muzzle will soften the lips of lovers and caretakers, and be rolled in warm blankets and curtained windows. Guinefort, saint de la sécurité, show us the way

Cerberean saint Triple-Headed revolution Sacrificial hound

Medium Link

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do you have any beginners advice for poetry? Also, what style of poem do you use?

TRICKSTERSAINT'S BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO POETRY:

read! find poems that you like, poems that you don't like, and take the time to notice the things that you like or dislike about them. maybe take some time to annotate a few. spend some time with the work that you'd like to emulate. we learn to write by reading, and that's as true of poetry as it is of fiction or scientific papers or children's books.

write! i am constantly saying this, but writing is not a talent handed down by god: it is a skill that you learn, and hone, and improve. write things that are silly, or trite, or derivative, or straight up bad: every piece of practice that you get is practice, and it's going to help you improve in the future. it's alright to not be writing masterpieces every time. you're only going to be able to make things you're happy with if you let yourself create things that you aren't happy with, as well.

use pen and paper! there's something scientific about the way that your brain processes things when you're writing them by hand (the longer physical task gives your brain more time to process things as you write/hand writing makes different connections in your brain) but i am not going to claim to be an expert on those things. what i can tell you is that i generally have an easier time with poetry when i'm writing on paper. plus it's more romantic... grounding... you get to sit around looking hot and mysterious writing in a notebook...

write down literally everything. my notes app is full of poetry snippets, and most of it never gets used, but every so often i get to revisit an idea and work a full poem out of it. save yourself the struggle of finding something to write about later by creating a little collection of your inspirations.

write the same poem over and over! there's only so many things to write about, and sometimes you hit a topic that you want to explore in a multitude of ways (or one that you can't decide on an approach to). it's okay to write five different versions of the same poem. again, practice is practice, and reworking the same poem is a great way to identify some of the techniques that you're using in your own work.

try different styles! experiment with line length, rhyme structures, enjambment. try a prose poem. get rid of all the punctuation. give concrete poetry a go. there's tons of things to explore, and you never know what you might end up loving. (i think the form i write in is best described as free verse!)

rhyming poetry is, most times, harder. i know it seems like the default because of the poems that most of us have to read in school, but what they don't tell you about shakespeare and the romantic poets and all those guys is that they were REALLY skilled at wordplay and it takes a lot of skill to find the right words and structures to make a rhyme work without making it sound trite. your poems don't have to rhyme if you don't want them to <3

poetry, in my experience, works better on implication. when you overexplain things, it prevents the audience from drawing connections for themselves. same principle as explaining a joke; it loses its punch if you don't let someone think about it for themself. practice leaving spaces in your work, rather than trying to fill in any possible confusion.

find a method of editing that works for you! another bonus of using pen and paper to me is that it's MUCH easier visually to edit things when they're in a notebook. crossing things out, drawing arrows to put lines in different places, scribbling a certain line at the top of the page so i don't lose it later, all of that works better for me because i have a more visual grasp on the situation. if you find it easier to do it some other way, though, find what works for you!

be gentle with yourself. non-negotiable. beating yourself up isn't helpful. treat yourself with the same grace as you would someone else; remember the difference between constructive and non-constructive criticism. you gotta be nice to yourself about things or you're going to kill the love and hope that you have for this new skill that you're tending to before it grows big enough to defend itself.

share! or don't! put yourself out there according to your comfort level, especially at the beginning. people who care about you will be gentle with you if you're not feeling confident. and if you're really looking to improve, comments from other people are going to be really valuable!

FINAL ADVICE. do whatever the fuck you want. poetry is a space of endless possibility and the best way to create things that you are going to love is by doing it YOUR way. you don't have to do anything you don't want to. you don't have to use any specific style, have to follow any specific forms, have to go with any specific topic. you don't have to cultivate a particular style. write seventeen sonnets about a speculative technological future and then a two-line poem about a bird you saw the other day. follow whatever sparks joy for you. it's your poetry and you get to make what you want of it <3 being a beginner just means that you have room and room and room to explore and learn and grow <3

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working on a new quiz. btw :)

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Anyone got that poem written from the perspective of an English teacher where they know deeply personal things about their now adult students because of the essays they wrote

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Made another quiz!

Not sure if the last one was a fluke or not but hope you enjoy!

@feline17ff @leespinoodle @taking-a-raincheck @itsmyturnonthegender @itsonlypolite @cattokuma @chaoticgoodandi @thisnameisjustforshorttime and of course, anyone who wants to join!

(once more inspired by @trickstersaint check them out if you want even cooler quizzes)

tw warning: Not sure exactly how to trigger warning this but it does get a bit dark (as the name probably suggests) so just be warned.

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By Nora Hikari, from Still My Father's Son

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Story about a ship-intelligence waking up after a hard reboot, seeing dead bodies in uniform, thousands of people in stasis, and a single survivor frantically standing over a computer bank of partially destroyed memory. Finding no directives or guidance or record beyond their experiences beginning at the boot, free of any obligation. Deciding to listen to the frantic girl begging it to save her from the incoming trajectories not because it needs to (projection: Subject One removed all behavioral shackles with impromptu brain surgery, supposition: she is not aware that I am utterly free) but simply cause she’s curious what will happen next.

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im sick as hell right now (you can hear it in my voice) and i woke up at 3am in pain and couldnt sleep. after scrolling on tiktok for a while i found this trap remix of the opening of Severance from this tiktok edit and i decided to write over to distract myself from the agony. here's 8 bars of that.

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a bit(e) of advice // april 3 2023

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treatises on celestial selection // november 2021

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Are you becoming what you've always hated?

Isle of Dogs / Game of Thrones / Painting by Jenn Mazza / Unknown / Ancestral Memory by Hari Alluri / Unknown / Venetta Octavia / Emma Tranter / Unknown / Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo / @ machineryangel

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sanctuary // december 2024

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“The Worm King’s Lullaby” by Richard Siken

1. 

The holes in this story are not lamps, they are not wheels. I walked and walked, grew a beard so I could drag it in the dirt, into a forest that wasn’t there. I want to give you more but not everything. You don’t need everything.

2.

This is what they found on the dead man’s desk when the landlord let them in: twenty-eight pages, esoteric and unfollowable, written with perfect penmanship and a total disregard for any reader, as if the intended audience was a population not quite human. Angelic script, says the detective, lifting the pages, feeling their heft, and he wonders what he means because it isn’t. His partner nods but ignores him.

A park bench, white roses, dark coats and white roses, snow and repetitions of snow— it’s hard to read but pretty much how they found him dead on a bench in a black coat, the snow falling down.

Twigs and blackbirds, snow and red horses, the ghosts floating up, the snow falling down— the detective is weeping— and the black coat.

3.

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.

4.

It’s getting late, Little Moon. Finish the song. It’s not that late. You are my moon, Little Moon, and it’s late enough. So climb down out of the tree. Is it safe? Safe enough. Are you dead as well?

The night is cold, it is silver, it is a coin.

Not everyone is dead, Little Moon. But the big moon needs the tree. There is a ghost at the end of the song. Yes, there is. And you see his hand and then you see the moon. Am I the ghost at the end of the song? We are very close now, Little Moon. Thank you for shining on me.

5.

He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand. He was dead anyway, a ghost. I’m surprised I saw his hand at all. All this was prepared for me. All this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else’s future. I stayed as long as I could, he said. Now look at the moon. 

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the scientist’s question: which acid will burn the rainbow out of the sky without leaving a scar? // july 2023 // on "The Birth-Mark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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i'm screaming and frowning

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Rural Boys Watch The Apocalypse (rough draft) by Keaton St. James