8.
The point is: we will always be
separate when we’re still in our skin.
We will always be

You are the deepening that grows behind the willow tree

The thing that the sun doesn’t lick

You are the stillness where the wind splits its waves

Where I can hear

These trees have grown, all of them

But you wouldn’t know if you were

a birch, a chestnut, an oak leaf, a chipmunk

a car passing on this road in the night.

It’s as if

we’ve been moving at the same speed

giving us the sensation of stillness

We’re all ashamed of our vanities

as we should be

[Because the Devil's in the T.V.]

I’ve been here for what seems like days

and you’re still the afternoon shadows dancing around me.

I have only seen that which

I’ve felt with my hands.

And if you continue to

Refuse this touch, this print,

This love,

Then allow me to

Crash through the

Mirrors of your eyes.

Tessellations of my hands.

I touched the sound and splintered.

My body is the glass. You are

wrapped within my eyes, silver-laced,

unfurling into spidered veins.

Your hands have ears which turn to

finger our foundations. The drywall

hums this timbre when it’s waking.

I never claimed to value life-
However, it’s crept upon me that it must be true.

2.

As a passing fancy, I used to wonder which
of your severe ovations, which
of your overstated exaltations I could even stomach.
Weighed down by the glorious rhetoric
you’d adorned me with, I wasn’t sure
I could even parse the two sides of my bathroom mirror.

There are 9 of us in the project and what we’re gonna try to do is write poetry together. The protocol is as follows:

• The blog will start as a whole with one person writing 8 lines of a poem and nothing more. (Each poem will be created by making a separate post for it in the blog.)
• They will contact a second person and that person will add an additional 8 lines to the poem. (Give yourself AT LEAST a few hours before editing and then passing it onto the next person. As a matter of keeping things fluid, its important you wait and then return to edit what you’ve written before letting the poem to continue so you’re satisfied and so the other writers know what they have to work off of. Preferably, you shouldn’t go back and edit things you’ve already written unless you feel quite strongly that it needs to be fixed.)
• Step 2 is repeated until one of the people writing feels the poem has reached completion and they will end at the beginning, end, or middle of the 8 lines they’re writing.
• That person will then begin a new poem and write however many lines they have left to write. (ex. if they finished the previous poem after adding 5 lines to it, they will write 3 lines of a new one. If they finished after writing 8 lines, they will start a new post and leave it blank, letting everyone know the old poem is finished.)
• Whoever is the one to finish a poem will go back and name that poem by adding a title to the post.
• As far as line breaks, how many lines a poem is, etc. Anything goes really. The only rule is that when its your turn, you have to write 8 lines but where you add stanzas or choose to end poems is completely your call.
• Right now we’re gonna try to go in a continuous order so after you write, contact the following person on this list to write the next bit (the order was in fact created with a random number generator so I held no bearing over any coincidences):

Phil Dinius
Nadia Waggener
Scott Polhemus
Aaron Abel
Joe Sherlock
Liz Morris
Billie Tadros
Kaitlyn Wall
Melissa Goodrich

That’s about it. I hope this all works out and try not to take too long adding lines but also don’t just blow it off too much. If you have work to do then by all means, do so, just don’t write something random. Just wait ’til you have a free hour or so and think about it a little. Have fun!

P.S. - If you have any questions or problems using or navigating through the wordpress website, just let me or Liz know. I’ve had to learn its ins and outs in order to set this up so hopefully either I or Liz (who helped me make my account) can help you out. Also, if you have any questions of concerns about the project itself, email me (phil) directly at my susquehanna email so we can get it sorted out. Thanks!