The Sky from a 18th floor project window.
The Sky from a 18th floor project window by Magdalena
People often think that when you look out a project window in New York City you won’t see anything beautiful and most of the time you don’t.
I caught these beautiful skies that left me at a loss for words.
I’m sharing them with an audience so that they too can see something beautiful out of a project window where you often see so much ugliness.
I hate calling the midwest humble
At 8 PM
living is tantamount to pranks
and I’m a truck stop lighter,
choreographing a game show
like a wound spring.
Years on,
I’m still decontexting
how someone said
“Stop trying to be a poet”
as if at-odds pretension
taking too much to heart
and getting too into natural wine,
while wrestling darker corners in public,
was leading to something
or was even enough.
Now penning PowerPoint poetry
distilling ideas to barest bones,
all weary and listless,
I ask to nobody:
“Am I good if I can pay the bills
or do I keep wearing this hurt as a charm?”
Then I try damndest to accept
that I’m not that person
not like that, at least, not anymore.
So let me just write the virtue
and fill the misshapen hollow
pulling me at will.
As my laptop burns out
let me say again:
“Spring may thaw,
but winter softens me.”
I just want to be soft forever
so I can keep falling asleep
to the purples and whites
of a middle west painter sky.
The two poems I’m submitting came after a long hibernation. They are separate, but entwined, coming from a rebirth of my writing practice. It was quite something to find that spark again. Before them I’d just write things down and forget what they are. After a while, something shifted—I was compelled again to come back and find truth in them. To make them poetry again. That perseverance and evolution has kept me warm through the winter. I hope the reader feels it too, or at the very least, finds something they need.
by Ananta Prayitno
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Rebirth – April 2023
Explore works of art and literature from around the world inspired by the beginning of Spring, the changing of the Seasons, and the anticipation we feel after the standstill of winter.
