poetry postcards of may

twenty years old and still indecisive about line-breaks

what a month May was! this time last year, i was in a very different place; nineteen, pre-postcards, and pre-affinity for watercolor. this month’s edition of postcards are all hand-painted on a set of watercolor postcards gifted to me by my dearest friend Hannah for my birthday this month. it was so charming for me to open all my gifts this year and witness how well my friends know me, demonstrated by the simple gestures of thought they put into my gifts. everyone gave me something handmade, or some sort of tools for me to play with and develop my own handmade creations. in that spirit i’ve designed and painted all of this month’s postcards, front and back!

May 2nd, 2023

i wrote this poem in a rotting state after a full day spent sulking in bed. somewhere in my subconscious mind emerged the idea of Sisyphus. and of death, too. i’m unsure of how the way i was feeling that day relates to either of the two, but at the time i felt the compulsion to write these every lines in a trance-like state. the painting i chose to accompany it is an ode to an old t-shirt i have of my fathers, one of the last remaining artifacts i have of him. it is a shirt from the Salvador Dalí museum we used to go to yearly, and has ants running around the front and backside of it. i added the outline of shoe prints as a representation of the shadow of death, and made the ants increase in size along their trail to symbolize aging.

May 5th, 2023

this poem is another one of those creations that seem to be born out of a possessed state; on a good day this time, though. my writing process is usually more slow-burn, beginning with a concept or phrase that takes a lot of contemplation to develop into a full poem. but i found poetry in impulse and urgency this month. there is much urgency in beauty.

May 28th, 2023

quite the gap between this poem and the last few! i experienced a period of brain-fog my first week after returning to my hometown for the summer that finally washed over and subsided with this poem. there is something very elusive about the way time moves during the summer. my experience with enduring it on the coastline of Miami renders the metaphors i use about the ocean here. there is both opportunity and suffering in the emptiness of a day.

thank you for reading this month’s poetry postcards! here’s some music that soundtracked my writing this month: