-Allēna
Category: Our Poetry
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I wrote this at the poetry workshop today. It’s called the “14 school commandments”.
“14 school commandments”
i.
be a juggernaut in class. (home was school and school was home, a haven away from my rich parents who I didn't know were rich, and the wealth of my mind could carry its own weight. at least there I was doing something right.)
ii.
run a protection racket for foreign exchange students. (at home I was powerless. at school I was powerful. my mother called me selfish more than my name, and there I could be someone, something worthy. I could be something worth caring about.)
iii.
make friends from the wrong side of the tracks to run fades on ne’er do wells (on the subject of power and love, my friends were more my family than my family ever was, and you never went against my family.)
iv.
make popular kids owe you favors (my mother taught me how to search the world with a hardened gaze for treasure, for leverage, for the exits, this served me well.)
v.
befriend security guards (where love cannot serve you, rely on fear and awe)
vi.
have zero fear and utmost faith in your own skill (I was never unafraid, but if I didn't ask and fight for what I wanted, nothing good would happen for me, at home OR at school.)
vii.
form a gang of oddballs (they were kind. they cared like me, but heavy was the head that wore the tarnished crown and nothing ever made me feel completely at peace)
viii
have a hot boyfriend (my parents always said “a good relationship or marriage should make you feel like you have the better end of the deal” but everyone ended up losing and I just ended up hollow and desiccated, lost in my head and exhausted because I had no idea how to just feel, just be, and I still don't)
ix.
throw legendary parties (I didn't know how to stop running, stop performing, stop… I had given up then, I imploded, and in the implosion I found my way, ambling through the rubble)
x.
be tight with the “mean” vice principal (she reminded me of myself, I think, alone at the top)
xi.
know everyone (because that's how you get somewhere, right?)
xii.
take a legitimate interest in people (I just wanted to feel like SOMEONE cared, anyone)
xiii
act like you're on speed all the time to such an extent that you get the nickname “adderall” (why couldn't I ever slow down? was it excitement or was I simply afraid that if I quit, I would feel the sadness that constantly threatened to envelop me?)
xiv.
do as I say.
(not as I do.)
-Allēna 8/5/2025 -
This was my poetry performance from this Monday.
Long overdue footage incoming! This is “alexandrian aphasia”.
“alexandrian aphasia” originally appeared in our zine make me your villain.
-Allēna
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“the fire watcher’s bomb”, digital mixed media, 8/27/2025
my mother, a self professed pyromaniac, my late father, and I, all loved the band u2. her favorite song (and album) of theirs was, not so coincidentally, in my opinion, called “the unforgettable fire”. was she telling on herself? probably.
our poem “the fire watcher’s bomb” talks about the two generations of pyromaniacs on our mother’s side that came before us, our own struggles with compulsions, and our mother’s projections. this digital mixed media piece contains lines from “the fire watcher’s bomb”.
“the fire watcher’s bomb” appears in our upcoming zine, fear not the brave pain, which drops on october 11. ✨
it’s gonna be fire 🔥
-Allēna
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The new zine is slowly taking shape.
We’re calling it Fear Not The Brave Pain and dear gods, it’s shaping up to be a void flavored behemoth.
Here’s the cover art I did today:
-Peri
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I just wrote this. It’s called “hurricane lazarus”, and it’s inspired by a conversation I had with a very powerful soul I met yesterday.
I was born in an otherwise normal middle of june at the tail end of tornado alley. I’m a gemini, scorpio moon, half air, half water, all storm and
tremendous force. say what you want about astrology, scorpios, or geminis, I’ll tell you what I know. I learned as a young child why they name storms after people.
perhaps some seal or some levee broke in an unseen place upon my birth, because death would dog my every step
and I swear on my father’s grave that hell
followed after that.
nine months after I was born, I got sick twice,
one week apart. the first virus took out my
immune system, the second took out my heart.
but I was a fighter. they hooked me up to a
machine that would breathe for me. one dose
of the meds they gave me would knock
my full grown, linebacker sized father out for
ten hours because I refused to go quietly,
like a category five hurricane slamming into
a coastline during the worst season on record.
I ripped through death and pain so goddamned
hard that death had a near me experience.
then came a sepsis scare. then a stroke. then
near starvation. each time I wailed a hurricane,
hundred fifty seven mile an hour straight line winds.
death learned to hate to see me coming.
all before I was three.
I learned to watch the storms that mirrored my
soul, learned to love the wind and the water,
find peace in the howling and the sickly blue green sky. in 2000, two tornadoes tore through
my city, devouring chunks of the skyline. there
are still signs and monuments there if you know
where to look.
nobody thought I’d live to see eighteen, twenty one, twenty three. they bet against me, calling me
crazy, plotting against me, betraying me when I needed them most. I learned to become inevitable, to channel my force into words, into song, into low pressure systems of my own.
so their plans didn’t hold.
their levees didn’t hold. they cracked under their
own weight and were washed away in the storm
surge when the people didn’t evacuate in time.
when I was twenty five, a boyfriend called me
what I was, a barely contained hurricane.
I lived with a lover when I first moved to
milwaukee who worked on emergency alert
machines. I learned the names of my surroundings when storms
rolled in with the same passion in which I
learned about her, the same way I studied the
storms when I was younger.
and I wonder if someday
someone will name a hurricane after me.-Allēna 9/22/2025
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This was my Tabi Po performance.
I slammed “sin eater”.
“sin eater” was originally published in my zine when the lighting strikes me back.
-Allēna
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So apparently being antifascist makes me a terrorist now??
Fuck it. Might as well go all in.
Here are a few poems I wrote for an antifascist literature jam.
The full zine is here if you want to read it. I’m gonna speak freely while there’s still some semblance of a First Amendment left.
-Allēna
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My first ever performance of my poem “let us all raise a glass to nothing at all”.
It was originally published in our third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold to the Morning.
Here is the performance:
-Allēna
