poetry <3

I want to be / One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial

I don't want words to sever me from reality / I don't want to need them. I want nothing / to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom / or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond / or the sound of water poured in a bowl.

♥ other people's poetry that i enjoy ♥

• "monet refuses the operation"- liesl mueller - the current poem that is occupying a large portion of my brainspace. i can't explain it it's so?????? "aberration / caused by old age, an affliction" are words that i roll around my head because the visual of aberration / affliction are really good, and so are the sounds. "I tell you it has taken me all my life / to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels / to soften and blur and finally banish / the edges you regret I don’t see" IS SO. it reminds me of
• "ode to my alarm"
• "self-portrait against red wallpaper"

♥ poetry that i have written ♥

pretty much everything that i have written / published from high school is going to be under the name "september lin." this is because in high school i had an overwhelming fear of the mortifying ordeal of being known and all that good stuff. poetry from now is going to be under my real name. probably?

in reverse chronological order of publication i think.

everything i write is kind of accidentally a love poem. i have no idea how this keeps happening.

• "ten candles" - oakland review (forthcoming) - i love my friends. that's it, that's the whole thesis.


• "i lift my lids and all is born again" - oakland review (forthcoming) - hey feeling better after being mentally ill for a long time feels kind cool that's kinda nice.


• "COOPERATE / COOPERATE" - renaissance review - this poem is based on payoff matrices! i was doing my econ homework and i was looking at the little payoff matrix diagram for the prisoner's dilemma and went "wait hold up this would actually slap so hard as a poetry format" (and it's been done before! i found this as i was googling to see if stuff like this already exists "game theory" by zoe hitzig


• "ode for the summer before a friend leaves for college" - blue daisies journal


• "letters found in the patterns light makes when it gleams off the leaves of a poisonous plant" - issue 2 of lovers literary journal - i'm so normal about this is how you lose the time war, i promise


• "in the end, i want to die like the ocean" - the tide rises, the tide falls - there's a joke that poets only write about love and death and this is my death poem, i guess. the tidepool / eyes image i am pretty sure is inspired by tracy k. smith's "my god, it's full of stars" - Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last / Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on / At twilight."


• "and they throw the matches down into the glitter" - ice lolly review - the title is a misquoting (oops) of a line from fall out boy's "rat-a-tat" - there's a certain vibe in some songs/ poems i like? like biting someone? or something you can bite on? something hard that you would think about as you stare at a starry sky from the roof of a car? that i was trying to harness in this poem. i don't think it fully succeeds but oh well. this one is also me being like "hey how many crime puns can i fit in one poem?" and surprise of surprises, it also turned into a love poem- i'm not sure if it is, but i would be incredibly unsurprised if this is also based on "this is how you lose the time war."


• "therefore i am" - beautiful mind issue of snowflake magazine - this one is me being like "hey i make a lot of metaphors to explain my brain. what if i put them all in one poem and see what happens." and the result is me being intensely pretentious and anxious, apparently! this one is ALSO a love poem -- there are specific references in this poem both to my brain and the object of the love poem that i think only i will get -- but that aspect, and, i think, the poem as a whole definetely takes inspiration from k-ming chang's "symmetry."


• "lost boys and windowsill thieves (haibun for slowly growing up" - the bibliopunk


• "magnetism" - adoxography lit (now defunct :( )