Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

So... no one's made of stone. No one's perfect. Especially yours truly. Last night, fudo invited me into a collab on Discord. The bourbon started flowing, and there I went. Up that road. But it was a great night. The eight writers involved were amazing, to say the least. I had a blast. Here's a link to a video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPo81x-1Pu0

I'll tag the Excellent Eight in the comment below, along with all the usual suspects.

And.

As always.

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

Today, we oficially kick off the Post of the Week, and give you details about the Challenges. Happy to say we're reigniting the Challenge of the Week, and each one is a big, fat 25 bucks to the winner. But, onto the new video: On the channel, we feature a beautiful human creature (rhyme level-10-boom!) with a wolfe in the username. Tell you what right now, she's also a beautiful reader. Tune in to the link below to hear the words of this unique talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnOuxbUhelg

And.

As always.

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

It's not enough. I am - what? For some reason I think of Virginia Woolf, who had a room of her own, and also stones in her pockets. Do we die for art, or does art die with us?

I'm not actually that retrospective. I'm just a girl. An administrative assistant who writes poems under her desk on post-it notes, hoping to god today isn't the day someone empties the trash and finds out about my existential crisis.

I have forgiven my enemies. My mother is sincere now, and I am fond of her absolute disdain for everyone. When I was a child, she would throw things and chase me and call me unspeakable names, and I learned to internalize it as one does. Therefore, I am convinced everyone hates me. But her vocabulary is utterly fantastic and I laugh heartily at her mockery of others, her ability to laugh at what is utterly ridiculous.

I am a psycho. I count out the number of times I read sentences because I am anxious I will get the meaning of them wrong. I am convinced cameras are watching my every move at work. When I write those aforementioned poems under my desk, I make sure the person reading them will be entertained, so there's always some comedy to my madness. I daydream about writing topics. I see an email come in and do not forward it because won't the sender know? They won't. That's the point.

In a panic, I text people back whom I haven't responded to in days because I was writing and submitting to contests. I refresh my personal email twice a minute. I apply to new jobs, eager and desperate to not have an old crow of an office administrator tell me to file the paperwork for a third time in one day. I'm done. And I am over it.

In 2018, I spent New Years Day at McLean, a mental hospital where Sylvia Plath and other illustrious poets slept and ate while overly medicated. I saw the ball drop at midnight in the sterile hospital rec room and heard a song sung, one I hated at the time but now relish. It reminds me of sickness and being utterly out of control. Nostalgia, if you will. And something for the post-it notes.

I don't reminisce often, I am far too tired and still hopelessly medicated into sedation. But one thing I know for sure is: I'm still figuring out who this body is. I breathe. But do I think? For myself, about anyone else at all?

It is hard being mentally ill, harder to fight it, easiest to write about it.

when, once,

we spoke in the tongue

of the sun itself.

as the waves soaked

our pant legs,

shoulders dusted

in freckles and music notes.

when we, once,

stood on the edge of

the water and

drew

constellations in

the pliable air between us.

we wrote in

repetitions

about each other, just

because we could.

when, once,

we understood each other,

when

the sun and the air and the waves

were all

ours.

We are all lizards--scaly reptiles with murderous, greedy, self-serving minds around which we have evolved the civilized human parts to suppress those antediluvian urges.

But those dark limbic thoughts are still thought. Those horrific hippocampal urges still urge us. We're just too smart to listen to them. But we still think them.

Worse, some of us even think them over.