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Taking a Little Break!

Brooke1 Comment

Hi everyone,

Happy Sunday! Just wanted to check in and say that I’ll be taking a break– the beginning of the school year and adjusting to life with everything in-person and piles of work has been more chaotic than I expected. Hope you all are doing well and enjoying the turn of the season.

I’m not sure when I’ll start posting again, but hopefully soon. I look forward to having more time to write in the near future.

Please feel free to leave writing challenges in the comments in the meantime! Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

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To the Hummingbirds

BrookeLeave a comment 
Hummingbirds are quite fickle but
this one fancies my mother’s garden

Perhaps she is as sun-drunk as I am
as I can see the atoms that make up

her quivering breast from where I lay
on the rough sidewalk

I never knew them to be loud creatures
but zip—a vibration too quick

for me to place the tone of reverberates
through my ears—it cannot shake

the room as the garden has no walls
(the great outdoors are like that, you know)

but if we sat in the living room,
maybe the walls would shake

I hope you enjoyed this piece! I’ve been super inspired by nature when I’ve been writing lately– I guess I always have been, though. I hope you all are having a great summer. Please feel free to leave feedback and writing challenges in the comments. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

Here to See – Poem

BrookeLeave a comment 
In quiet moments: casual dinners
at the table, drawn to our respective

phone screens on the couch, a short
car ride, we examine each other

carefully. I feel seen even when you
don't talk to me, and I am here to see

you, always. As the days pass,
I appreciate our comfortable silence

more and more. The curves of one's face,
slight turns of the head, the somehow

so perceptible tone of one's footsteps--
these are the things we notice

as the days stretch and bleed into 
each other, and we are still together.

I hope you enjoyed this piece! I honestly wasn’t completely sure where I was taking it, but I figured I’d still throw it out there since some of the imagery was interesting. Feel free to leave feedback and writing challenges in the comments. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

Young Writers: Submit to Intersections Mag!

BrookeLeave a comment

Hello everyone!

It’s been a couple months since the online youth literary magazine I founded, Intersections, released its first issue. We are accepting submissions for our second issue at the moment– poetry, prose, and cover art accepted from youth ages 13 and up (up to college students so our age limits are a little vague). We’re looking for work that deals with the complexity of young people’s experiences in our current world, work that addresses current events, serious topics, and strong emotions.

If you would like to learn more about our mission and read our first issue, you can visit our website here. You can follow our work @intersectionslitmag on Instagram as well.

Please consider submitting and feel free to leave questions about the magazine in the comments! I would love to answer them directly, or I could even do a Q&A/FAQ post regarding starting the magazine if anyone would be interested.

Stay safe and healthy out there– and submit to Intersections!

Brooke

Color-Coded Candy – Poem by Me

BrookeLeave a comment 
let's sit in the kitchen and organize all
the candy we've collected in the cupboards,

even if half of it's expired. we can unwrap
each chocolate bar so they'll all melt into

puddles, slightly different shades of brown.
we'll never want to eat sugar again, like

our half-baked version of Halloween when
we ate each piece and the bottoms of our

pillowcases-turned-trick-or-treating bags
were littered with the colorful wrappers,

not color-coded at all. 
let's keep it simple and make it harder on

ourselves, once more.

I hope you enjoyed this poem! It was kind of inspired by the fact that Halloween’s really not that faraway at this point. Before we know it, the holiday season will be upon us! Please feel free to leave feedback and writing challenges in the comments. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

Seeing Through Glass – Poem by Me

BrookeLeave a comment 
I don't look in the glass to see you, 
but to see what's left behind. I'll
look at all the glass I can find:
chapstick marks on water bottles,
fingerprints on the bathroom 
mirror, and whatever else has 
been pressed into the glass by you.

This is super mini-poem, but it is what it is. I hope you enjoyed it regardless. I can’t believe we’re basically halfway through September already! Please feel free to leave feedback and writing challenges in the comments. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

Let’s Talk: Blogging During Quarantine

BrookeLeave a comment

Hello everyone!

I wanted to talk a little bit about my current blogging goals and how my blog has changed since quarantine, as well as blogging in general. I know a lot of people have started blogs and other digital projects during quarantine, and lots more people have been consuming more digital content as usual, whether that’s Netflix and YouTube videos or blog articles. If you’re interesting in hearing more on my perspective regarding blogging during quarantine, keep on reading!

First off, I’m just going to say that it’s been difficult to come up with fresh ideas to blog about during this time. I don’t want to focus too much on the actual issues at hand since everyone’s already aware of them and I don’t have any personal stories to bring to the table, but there’s also not as much activity in my life outside of the house with everything going on. I did make the switch to focusing almost exclusively on writing content, but even then, it’s been hard to find writing inspiration.

As I’ve discussed before in various posts surrounding the purpose behind this blog and my goals for its future, my content doesn’t fit neatly into one particular niche. Although you might say I’ve become exclusively a poetry blog, I still create other content focusing on education, other aspects of writing besides my own pieces, and I’m always open to requests in the comments.

I still think blogging is a great way to get your thoughts out, especially during these times where you might feel super isolated. No matter what you’re writing about, there’s something special about putting words on the page and sending them off where other people can read them. It’s even more amazing having someone connect with your work, especially when they go out of their way to tell you so.

I’ll probably revisit this topic in the near future, but hopefully I won’t have to, and better times are just around the corner. Please feel free to leave feedback and writing challenges in the comments. Stay safe and healthy out there– wear a mask! 🙂

Brooke

Daily Dish – Poem by Me

BrookeLeave a comment 
the pristine white fridge, pure and clean
dirtied by the "schedule," corners peeling.

monday: meatless
tuesday: tacos
wednesday: pasta
thursday: meat
friday: pizza

defining dinnertime before it happens, waiting
for us to wield our forks at the dinner table
silently.

I want to peel the sad list off the fingerprinted
surface, but it's nice to pretend things are normal
and so are we.

This is a really cheesy and somewhat dramatic piece, but it was fun to write as always. It was inspired by my mom making that exact schedule for our weeknight dinners so she can plan everything when she goes to the grocery store. As a picky eater, those are the main things I eat. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments and/or writing challenges. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

One Year Of This Blog!

Brooke2 Comments

Hello everyone!

Today I wanted to take some time to write a quick thank you and acknowledgement of the one year anniversary of this blog. Technically I started it in mid-June of 2019, but I feel like I didn’t really get into it or start planning for what I wanted to center this blog around until July 2019. Nonetheless, I cannot believe it’s been almost a year of me posting daily and sharing my thoughts with the world on here.

Thank you so so so much to anyone viewing this, anyone who has viewed my other posts, and anyone who has taken the time to like one of my posts or comment something nice. It makes me smile to see that people enjoy reading my musings and like my poetry, and I hope that my posts can be helpful or entertaining to you all in some way.

It’s funny how although I still don’t have a definitive direction to take this blog in (it’s definitely more of a fun little side project), I have narrowed the focus of my posts so much throughout this past year. I originally wrote about so many things, but I’ve been consistently posting poetry/writing content and the occasional school post for the past couple months. I never thought I would be sharing my poetry on the Internet, let alone so frequently, but here I am! It’s been such a nice experience to know that my work is being seen and can resonate with others.

Thank you for sticking with me this past year if you’ve been here since the beginning, and thank you for coming along for the ride if you’ve joined anytime since. I appreciate each and every one of you! This blog is clearly so personal to me, and I never imagined that more than a couple people would really care about what I had to say.

Please know that I am always open to feedback, suggestions, and just having a conversation! I know I may have attracted readers from the various types of content I previously dabbled in, so just let me know if there’s something you’d like to see or a category of post I haven’t made in a while that you enjoyed. Although I write these posts just for fun, I still want to make sure that other people can enjoy what I’m putting out.

As a side note– I know times are really tough right now, physically, emotionally, financially– all of it. Reading blogs and books and the like is honestly such a nice escape from the news, other exhausting forms of media, and reality in general. I’m not just saying this because I want you to read my posts. I’m saying it because I know we all need to give ourselves some TLC right now, and reading can be super relaxing, enriching, and entertaining all in one. If you need some book recommendations, check out my recent post about the books I’ve read in spring. I will be making a similar post at the end of summer about all the books I read in the summer months.

Happy one year of this blog! Hopefully there are many more to come. Thank you all again 🙂 Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke

Valleys – Poem by Me

BrookeLeave a comment 
the syllables get caught in my throat trying to 
slide off my tongue-- the word doesn't look
right when i type it out in a paper. 

v a l l e y s
forget these silly grammar rules of words ending in
Y and changing it to -ies

forget the word itself, forget the valleys (and the valleies)
where the heat traps itself in the air, where
the wind blows just a little bit harder

This was a short one, but I thought it was kinda fun since I focused in on a specific word. I technically live in a valley (valley is part of my city’s name!) so it’s just something I thought about using as the topic of a poem. Please let me know if you have any feedback on this piece or any writing challenges you’d like me to try out in the near future. Stay safe and healthy.

Brooke