I've been writing a lot of short things lately, so here they are!!! this is a really random, disjointed collection. but i think they're all at least ok, so I wanted to share them here :) some of them dip a lot closer to poetry than I ever really got before all this. some creative nonfiction too? but 2025 was a tumultuous year and it turns out sometimes the only way to survive that is a prose poem.

Banquet of the Drowned Girls

(note: i might come back and edit this one. I like it a lot and want it to be a bit longer. idk.)

The drowned girls meet for dinner at the bottom of the harbor on the night of the full moon. Its creamy light filters through the filthy brown water to rest upon their tangled hair, bloated stomachs, translucent skin. Kathleen, clad in a fishing net that drags scrap metal behind her, lays her head on the hull of a sunken boat and bemoans her lost love. Her left hand is empty of a wedding ring. He took it back before he pushed her over the edge. Joanna pats her back with fingers that have withered to stubs, skin so soft it tears if she pushes too hard. The ragged remains of her fingernails catch on Kathleen’s knotted net of a wedding gown. Across the hull, Marisol splays her collection of bones onto rusted metal and Florence picks her favorites, pulls several small bones from the pouch at her waist to give in exchange. Her foot fell off two weeks ago, she says. Marisol takes the bones reverently, greedily. No bubbles escape any of their mouths. No ripples from their motion reach the surface. To see them from above would be to intrude upon the utmost intimacy, to peer into a moment that no one else could belong in. Not to be heard by anyone who has never been thrown over the edge of a ship, who has never leapt from a cliff, who has never sunk beneath the waves, willing or not, and decided to stay there.

after the phone call ends,

it seems like the least dramatic, most natural thing to do is to just lie down on the ground and never get up again. To stare at the ceiling, the sky, forever unthinking, unblinking. The plane stumbles south through turbulence and lands in humid heat. During the whole funeral, his watch sits in a bowl at home and continues to tick. Tonight, voices will surround it and its hands will continue to spin across the dial. And all you can do throughout it is lie down and wait.

SOLAR MAXIMUM

I went out to see the aurora at nine thirty P.M. It was the second night in a row I was trying, as if I didn’t know already that it would never show itself so far south two days in a row. I’d tried to see them four other times in my life, and only been successful twice. Both times I’d gone alone, the sky had been empty. Tonight was no different. I liked to dream that one day, the solar storm to end all solar storms would come, that the lights would dance through our Southern Maryland skies the same way they danced over Iceland, and I liked to dream that it would take all our cell phones with it. My phone sat heavy in my hand, the cause of all my woes, because inside of it lived all four people who had declined my invitation to stand on the bluff in the cold, staring at the sky through our cameras in the hope of seeing a faint shadow of color. I laid down on the grass and strained to see anything. No faint pink on the horizon, no green, no mysterious lights. One other person sat on the overlook with me, twenty feet away. We did not attempt to speak. I am going to be outgoing, I’d said in the car as I drove here. Just like last night! If I see someone, I will talk to them! I said this every time I went out alone. I never succeeded. I held up my phone to take a picture, and even on its grainy screen to say there was a light in the sky would be wishful thinking. I did wish it, very much. If only the universe could not fail me just this one thing. I got back up and walked to my car. As I drove back to my apartment, I saw the glinting eyes of a deer beside the road. I slowed down so I wouldn’t hit it, and it galloped away. I could see his antlers as he trotted alongside the ditch, finally leaping over a wooden fence into the ghost frame of a house that stood there hundreds of years ago. The people who once lived here had sat beneath countless solar maximums, under far darker skies. The aurora must have shone here again and again.

SOLAR MAXIMUM II

The first time I tried to see the aurora was across the Atlantic Ocean the day after a historic solar storm which I had learned about from my aunt’s Facebook page, the sky over her vegetable garden in Massachusetts turned an unearthly purple. I was hopelessly jealous. I was in the middle of the city that night and even if I’d known it was happening I’d never have seen it. So the very next night, hoping some residual electromagnetic energy in the sky would spare some kindness for me, I took the bus to Blackrock and sat with a dozen strangers on that concrete shelf between the sea and the baths — the tide was coming in. We looked up at the sky and we looked left to the north but of course north was the lights of Dublin and even if the aurora did show itself that night the city would have drowned it out.

The second time I was back in Southern Maryland and I thought I’d missed it; I was inside laughing with friends and hadn’t thought to look outside. When I finally took out my phone it had blown up with messages from every friend saying LOOK OUTSIDE, LOOK OUTSIDE! I’d known a solar storm was coming that night and I’d forgotten all about it. Four of us piled into my roommate’s car and drove to Church Point where we stood beside the wooden cross that marked the landing site of the first English colonists to set foot in Maryland and we looked up at the sky, trying to figure out which way was north. (Right.) Even with our naked eyes, thirty-eight degrees north, we could see that pink blush in the dark sky, hemmed with green, dotted with stars. To say it danced would be a lie. It shifted, like the moon, never appearing to move until you looked away, and when you looked back you realized it had travelled all across the sky. We took pictures and compared them. We stood and watched till we got cold in the late-October night. When we headed up the hill and it seemed like the peak had passed a crowd had gathered at the graveyard bluff but we’d had the best view all along.

Next was just a few months later. My hopes weren’t high but it was worth a shot. I was in Reykjavik on a stopover, a flight home from visiting the aforementioned roommate during her semester in England. NOAA predicted auroras that night. It was the furthest north I’d ever been. So I walked down to the yellow lighthouse I’d drawn earlier, I couldn’t say its name, and the fishermen had all left and the dock was cold. The sun was setting and clouds were rolling in. I looked across the pristine water at a mountain rising up across from me. I felt terrible at how little I could do in my time in this country. Everything was expensive and I had far less time than I’d thought I did and to be honest I wanted nothing more than I wanted to just be home already. I’m not cut out for solo travel and as I stood beside that squat yellow lighthouse looking at the darkening sky I cried on the phone with my father. The clouds were too thick. I gave up on the northern lights. One day when I had a steady paycheck and someone to travel with I’ll come back to Iceland, I told myself, and then we can watch the aurora all night long.

After that, it was November again, and I was sitting in my room drawing and thinking about going to bed and there again was my roommate, knocking on my door. Come in? I said. The aurora! she said. Do you want to go see the aurora? And so I threw on my coat and we got in my car and drove back to the graveyard. We didn’t go all the way down to the point this time, just stood on the bluff. It wasn’t quite as dark but it also wasn’t quite as cold. In the sky the pink was faint. We could see it better through our phone cameras, but if you opened your eyes wide as they’d go and stared long enough, you could make it out. We walked back to the car together when we’d had our fill. Just us.

The next night I thought I might as well try again. No one could go with me. I have to work on this essay. I’ve come down with something. It’s time for bed I fear. (It’s 9 P.M.) I drove anyway and like every other time that I’d been on my own the sky was empty and I was left disappointed and there I was alone on the grass. I couldn’t even see it through my phone. What a sham of a solar maximum this is, I thought.

We fought that weekend. Was fight the right word? It felt like a fight. And I still felt it for months after. Now things are better again, finally finally finally, and the solar maximum is over. The aurora won’t grace Maryland again for another dozen years, or is it twenty-five. Ah well. Two out of five isn’t bad. And they both were with you.

Worms, Moles, Grubs

I will go underground now, with the worms and the moles. It is not because of what you have done, or at least that is what I will say to you. I will smile and I will settle into the dirt and I’ll let my sister shovel it over me because she’s the only one who will. It’ll be like the Hearse Song, how does it go, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. There they will be, all across my skin. Whether anyone will watch or cry for me, well, I haven’t decided that yet. I’d like to imagine that you will come to my graveside. Underground a grub will crawl into my ear, a sentinel carrying the news. My eyes will open but they will be rotted husks turned to dirt in their sockets. If I smile, it will be without teeth. Likely my mouth will not move, for I will be dead. Until, that is, you kneel down above me. Your knees will dig into the patch of grass above my grave. I’ll feel them, all bony, as if you’d jabbed them into my side. And you’ll cup your hands and pull dirt from above me, the dirt my sister so carefully laid down. When the sun hits my face it will be for the first time in a long time. You’ll trace a hand up my cheek, the skin papery and thin with rot. If your fingers snag on it and it tears, and my sticky coagulated blood wells up but doesn’t spill, you will not be repulsed and you will not jerk back in fear and in fact you will not notice it at all, you might lean in and your closeness will remind my leaden limbs that they are not dead at all — Yes? Hello? Oh, is that you at the door? Of course you can come in. Any time. Stop asking, really.

And above ground, I will think to myself that maybe I am not so alone after all.

All-Nighter (another dialogue exercise)

“I think,” she announced, “that if I have to read one more page of Margery Kempe’s wailing, I am going to tear my eyes out.”

“You did choose that prompt. And the class.”

“God, but she’s just so annoying. I wanted to write about Julian of Norwich and about Hildegard of Bingen but of course we just had to have a third primary source. And what are you working on? A picture?”

“Oh, come on—”

“It’s harder than it looks, I know, I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day your assignment was to pick up a camera and press buttons. And then turn it in and get an A.”

“I’m literally doing research too,” I said.

“Can you believe this?” she said, ignoring me. “She tells us for like a hundred pages —” she rifled through the book “— She tells us for the three longest pages in human history that she’s just so thrilled and excited about this friar coming to her church. And then she sits in the front row while he’s preaching and he’s just so holy that he drives her to tears, like she’s screaming like someone in childbirth, she’s so passionate about it, and he looks down at her and says ‘Can someone remove this woman? She is annoying people.’ I mean, I would probably just kill myself at that point.” She laid down and stretched out with her eyes closed and said, “What time is it?”

“Two thirty,” I said.

“What’s a dentist’s favorite time?”

“When’s your paper due?”

“Oh, fuck if I know.” Furious typing from her keyboard, and then “Thursday. So I’ve got a little time.”

“It’s Wednes — no, it’s Thursday now, it’s after midnight.”

“What if I just died?” she groaned.

“Come on, it’s not that bad. You always finish it in the end.”

“I think this one might be my limit,” she said. “For real.”

“You say that every time.”

“Genuinely this time. For serious. Maybe there’s still time to do the other prompt.” A pause. “Oh, no, never mind, that one’s on the Crusades. Look, Ellie, if I just gave you a gun and closed my eyes would you shoot me?”

“No, I’d never do that!”

“Easy for you to say! You haven’t just spent three hundred — four hundred? — three hundred and eighty-four pages in the head of the most annoying woman to ever write in Middle English. Do you think the fourteen children wrecked her brain?” She waved the book so that its pages ruffled back and forth. “And besides, all you’re doing is editing your pictures.”

“I’m reading about Cindy Sherman.”

“In modern English.”

“You’re holding a translation.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.”

“How much do you need to write?”

“Ten pages.”

“And you have…?”

“Eight. And the conclusion’s at least half a page.”

I looked right at her, wordlessly.

“But there’s so much to say, Ellie. So much. Her relationship with religion and with God is so much more personal than you’d expect, she spiritually married Jesus and then had spiritual sex with him. She talks to him all the time. It’s the most boring conversation I’ve ever read. And she feels so deeply. And she was so dedicated to her beliefs even when everyone else hated for her. She always stood her ground. And she wailed with the intensity of a toddler who’s just been denied dessert. Even outside of her religious-frenzy-weeping she complains so much. It’s impressive. She’s the most annoying narrator I’ve ever read for class. But she’s kind of a diva. You’ve got to respect her gumption. And she did survive having fourteen children in the 1400s. So. You know. You hate her so much but you’ve got to love her too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I get it.”