-Allēna
Tag: our poetry
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“still life (2019)”
“untitled still life (2019)”
I don't want to give names
to your fistfuls of hollow
coffee cup still half full, overturned
baroque broken words, reaching for something
that forever seems older
than you or I in every language
well run dry, and yet
despite yourself
each moment in atemporal space
teeming with life
when we met, I
wanted to drink myself into the ground,
an inelegant death like hemingway perhaps
after bleeding worlds onto ten thousand pages
inspired by black coffee and gin
I'm sober now and you're still empty glasses,
the smell of pages, wine
and cigarettes after two years of silence
I can still vanish into the liquor darkness of you
without ever tasting a drop
I don't want to die anymore
(most days)
and perhaps I am a fool
for wandering through your still life fortress of
melancholy
but you keep coming back to me,
three hundred year old moment
or perhaps you are a memory
I've never been good at untangling how I feel
and some days I feel like I am made of iron
but today I feel like nothing more than glass -
Allēna 3/1/2026 -
We did blackout poetry in workshop today. This is what I came up with:
I got this from an essay on Shakespeare’s King Lear. -Allēna
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Day whatever the fuck it is of posting our ekphrastic pieces because I can lol
This one is based off of “hurricane lazarus”, one of my favorites from our new zine.
In other news, I couldn’t remember the name of my world history teacher and it bothered me so bad that I looked through emails for hours from 10+ years ago and came up with nothing but exhaustion, so I think it’s sleep time. Good afternoon and goodnight.
-Allēna
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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 -
“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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Allēna left this poem collecting dust in our notes app, and frankly I think it’s illegal to just leave it there.
So here y’all go. She can yell at me later, I don’t care. It’s worth it.
I eat, I sleep, I feel my grief deep
I want to cry, I want to scream
But there are times it seems
I can't remember how to speak anymore
One time I dreamt you stared at me
Slack jawed as I was carried
On broad shoulders through a revolving door
And I hate to say it but I think
That's the kindest I can recall
Your eyes ever beholding me
And I don't ever want more than
The simple vindication of your
silent cry matching mine
All those nights years before
You don't know me, you never did
I never wanted you to
You were more in love with the bathroom mirror image of me
Than who I really was at my core
But I go on, I mock you now
The jokes practically write themselves
You're snowed in while I fly free
Not yours, never yours, not even close -
Not anymore-unnamed notes app poem by Lēna, posted by me (Castor)
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So I sorta snapped.
And republished our second poetry collection, To Dance With a Cyclone because I got very angry at everything and was tired of doing nothing. So I decided to do something that wasn’t nothing about it. I’m gonna see about our other works here shortly. But for now, I need rest. Goodnight, world.
Grab your copy here.
-Lazarus
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Yay, PTSD Art For The People!
Hey, peeps. This is Allēna. My PTSD is kicking my ass today, but at least y’all get cool art out of it. We appear to be that special kind of creator that gets even more inspiration when our trauma comes back to kick our ass, taking us from decently prolific to FUCKING ON FIRE creatively in order to cope with the emotional pain of it all. Today has been no exception. First up is a poem that spilled out of me this morning before I went back to sleep for about three hours:
Let’s set the scene
The year is 2019
I wake with the dawn and simply try and breathe -
You give me tools and time and I will build my way through this rage
I will sing and chew my way through the bars of
this cage
Five years later and I still can’t sleep
I still feel stuck with the cards close to my
concave chest
When will the craving subside?
When will I stop hungering for more?
Nothing short of everything?
They couldn’t take my mind
No matter how hard they tried
They couldn’t strip me of the things I’ve seen
They could never quite dull the hunger in my eyes
The dawn breaks anew and I lay in a room
still trying to spread these battered wings
surrounded by nothing but windows…And then I got inspired again this evening and painted what my synesthesia makes of “Didn’t It Rain” by Songs: Ohia, one of the songs that sonically shaped our album Metacognition. The PTSD attack is pertaining to the events that set off the hot streak that caused Eight to write and record the bulk of Metacognition, so I figured painting a song that he had on repeat at the time would help get some of the emotions out, and it did. I wasn’t present during that time, so I’m essentially having to process someone else’s trauma right now and all I know to do with it is make art and talk about art. I feel like a mess, even though logically I know it’s pretty damn healthy to process shit this way. Here is the painting for y’all:
Didn’t It Rain by me. I’m not really okay, y’all, but I deal with shit like this regularly enough that I know how to get through it safely, and y’all get cool art in the process. I’m over at Emerson’s currently, but once I’m back at Sheik’s I or whoever else is in front will probably drop some more spare room roaring on here. 💛
Fucking flashbacks.
Anyway…
Stay tuned for more magic!
-Allēna, your traumatized, if hyper-prolific, super-admin. Fuck PTSD up the ass with a Joseph cactus. 😭