TWG's Featured Deviant of the Month - January 2013 by =LadyofGaerdon on deviantART

TWG's Featured Deviant of the Month - January 2013

Fri Jan 4, 2013, 9:49 PM

Hello, dearest members! =LadyofGaerdon here to continue our series:

Featured Deviant of the Month

for

January's Featured Deviant is..........

~winterkate

#TalentedWritersGuild is a literature group committed to the encouragement, collection, and archival of high quality prose and poetry works. To find out more about the group, please click here.

Here at #TalentedWritersGuild, we encourage deviants to select only their best pieces of literature for submission. As judges, we look for pieces that simultaneously move us, challenge us, and inspire us as readers; pieces that stimulate us emotionally and intellectually; and the pieces that display true technical skill. When we vote, we consider all these things, and let only the pieces we deem up to snuff through to our gallery. This pushes our submitters to excel, challenge themselves, and improve their craft, and provides our readers with high quality literature to read.

The Featured Deviant of the Month is a member whose submissions meet and surpass this criteria.

~winterkate is a new and highly promising young addition to our literature community. Her words are filled with passion and utilized meticulously, to create thought-provoking, highly satisfying poetry.

~winterkate has 15 pieces in our gallery to date! They are all wonderful and I encourage you to check them out.

MEi. I fell in love with a girl who catalogued darkness,
sat in her room with the blinds closed and wrote down
187 ways it felt
in all of the different times she couldn't see.
My name was one of them,
#143, ash velvet, and I didn't know what she meant at the time
but the only description she wrote beneath it
was good night for stuffed animals
bad night for worn pillows.

And I'm sorry I made you dream of the rivers.

ii. I fell in love with a girl who never looked in the mirror
but dressed to perfection, somehow
in her blue skirt and black socks
white tennis shoes
and a smile crooked as the bottom side of Indiana –
yeah, I
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
A brilliant ode to self-acceptance
and loving everything you are,
~winterkate's words are hopeful
and inspire us to do the same.

to a womanYou see it coming from the men.
You see the ways their eyes linger on you
When they're looking around the room
The way their bodies brush yours when you're walking through the hallways to class
The way they stutter and look away when apologizing for the accidental contact of skin to skin
You see it coming from the men.
You never see it coming from me.

God, was the world not complicated enough already
Without causing me to notice the interplay of textures in her hands
The calluses like mahogany mountains carving ridges of stone
Into her palms softer than Impressionistic sunlight?
I'm not supposed to feel this way about another woman
In the words of ~SCFrankles:
A piece about unexpected and mostly-unrequited love.
This blew me away. The maturity of the
writing, the evocative imagery, the
contained emotion. Very, very moving.

Astronauti.238,900 miles away
the Earth gleams in the darkness.
A cat's eye, opalescent blue
flecked with terra verdant,
fifty-two cream colors
of cloud.

Under a heavy lid of night,
it glares. Angry.
Baleful.

As if to say to the Sun:
I was dreaming
of all the fish
in my seas.
As if to ask why
it had to be woken.

ii.
Thoughts are protozoan here;
with glass-thin skin
transparent as the first lie
he ever told as a child.
No,

I didn't steal that candy bar.

He can see the mechanics,
the workings,
the insides.
They divide like dreams,
impossibly smoothly,
Whole and unbroken
as they tear apart. If
he could stretch far e
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
A stunning ode to Ray Bradbury.

Poem for the TransgenderedAnd I am not one of you, but
I know what it's like
to want to crawl out of your own skin.

I am not one of you, but
I want to shed this 173.2-pound body, I want
to hear the smack, the boom, the crash
as it hits the floor and moulds gray, I want to see
the bruise flowers write blue and purple obituaries across my white skin
before it dissolves into garden soil, I want
my body to, for once, create something beautiful.

And I am not one of you but
sometimes I have wanted to cut off all my hair.
To lop off this shit stream that's coursing down my back,
to bury it in the back and become some
pixie/lesbian/dyke/whore/boy
I have ne
In the words of =AzizrianDaoXrak:
This piece is about a topic that is very close to MY heart,
and though other members of the trans community may
find that it doesn't quite hit their experiences on the nose,
there are moments, to me, where she gets it exactly rights:
To keep scrubbing till you could pick locks with my tibias, till
my bones are small enough and sharp enough
to sew myself back together with
And above and beyond these moments of terrible, painful beauty,
she treats the topic with respect, compassion, and a
sense of being kindred spirits, and for all this I am grateful.

Artist Discretionbreak

Oh,
Muse,
Please
No.

I don't want to I can't let me go leave me alone Ican't Ican't Ican't not knowing
all of the things
He will do
to make me
a beauty
all of the things
He will do
to make me
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
Poor splintered-up poem! A creative look at the
way a poem might feel about the rather brutal
treatment it often receives at the hands of its creator.

Volpi.You will find that the story you tell
is very rarely your own. In Lucca,
even the smallest pebbles
breathe in the warm sunlight.
Knotted stones and cobbled roads
beat out a paper-dry heartbeat heat –
my city breathes in and out,
inhales sparrow air.
It's writing a story.
You are the pen.

You will find that in Lucca
the daisy chains forge fire
in side streets and back alleys.
Teenagers intertwine. Tell me,
odd flower, are you still closed?
Here we are colored wax;
the heat of the city melts us.
We run into each other, rhapsody
of pigments. Operas are our specialties.
Open up; feel the reds.

If not, try and see t
In the words of `thetaoofchaos:
It is not a locale that has magic, danger, depth or purpose
as much as it is a catalyst to shake those things alive within us.
With this poem, the writer delivers such a place, both
outside and in, and with rare skill.

what if this was the song of myself?1. god laced your eyes with opium
stitched them shut with cotton fog. wake, love – cough
like a gunshot, breathe
like the blood eagle
has been carved into you. time didn't mean
to blind the moon's great eye, to
collapse it into the static horizon.
my lips can no longer pronounce the word mercy. wake,
love. please.
just breathe.

2. the days crack like porcelain dolls
under my father's boots. there are skulls
hidden in the cabinets, & shadows too, hung in the closet
like thin-pressed coats.
like suicide.

3. razor, rohypnol, rope. bathroom,
bedroom,
basement. if i touch all three
before i leave
i won't pick one up
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
This is horror in the best way -
the creeping, psychological skin-crawling way.

ScreamI
And since you have asked, a thousand times yes –

I have purgatoried my body in the loneliness of Northern Minnesota, wrapped in winter swells of wind and spun linen sheets thin as my own star-skein skin,
cried out in log cabins for souls already flown, cried out for the aid of bodies like rotting wood adrift on faraway and icy seas, shot through with holes from battling their own rip tides –
cried out selfishly help help I am losing the fight with the flight inside of me, losing the pitched war with inevitability; help help the fates are playing cat's-cradle with my lifelines and I can no longer
tell whether I am a tapest
In the words of =tonepainter:
This is raw, take no prisoners stuff.

Mercyhas nothing left.
A mouth full of flint
and shattered brown Jack Daniels glass.
Nocturne trench coat glaring stories
of sewer rats and back alleyways.
A tongue that reeks of gasoline.

She spits on fires when she see[k]s them.

Arson against every boy
she ever slammed over a table
and climbed onto like a Greyhound bus
that could take her
rolling away from herself.

She weeps during sex.
Only does it in darkness,
when no one can see her,
when the only light's glittering
off the broken stone teeth
that once spoke you whole.
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
Wow. Just wow. Also damn. Damn.

Bilingualismyo conozco la miel de tu piel – cuando we
rushed like languages leaping al triunfo y gloria
en los barrios pequeños, in the cities
of train tracks & half-cracked leyes de reyes lunáticos –
entonces yo entenderé treinta degrees of your heat,
of española y las lenguages half-filtered,
streaming like water sobre sidewalks after rain.

always toungues twine la misma en amor.
nosotros somos el tren carrying ten thousand dreamers west,
y yo te amaría en a thousand lenguas.
In the words of =AzizrianDaoXrak:
Is a lovely balance of English and Spanish.
Wistful and sweet, it dances back and forth
between the two to tell a love story of heat, trains, and cities.

THAT POEM (Writer's Block)I sat down at my computer last Thursday night
with the full intention of writing THAT POEM. Oh, don't
play dumb. You know what THAT POEM is. We all know
what THAT POEM is. You with the cigarette train-tracks
charting your eternal drift to nowhere
on the insides of your arms, you
with the sludge of alcohol dripping thick & brown through
veins swollen & slow & pussy as zombies, you
with the eight children whose faces you can't remember
& the husband in the Hamptons whose name you sometimes forget
& the lover who never seems to come around as much as you pay him to – you
all know what THAT POEM

is. It's the rhythm beating a dull
In the words of ^Beccalicious:
Best read aloud.

submit'submit art'
the button says,
lingering at the bottom of the screen
so small & blue, a bruise beneath
fragile skin.

i look at it,
mouse over it
again
feeling the tension in my thumb
the weight of time
the emptiness of my mind.
8:48 at night
and i have nothing to submit
except myself.
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
Wonderfully expressed.

Faminei told him
i wanted to spend
three days
paying my dues
to the circumference
of my spine, to the size
of my stomach,
and all
that was not in it.

weary
of my constant need,
he droned
a platitude
in a voice like cold coffee.
"you're beautiful
the way you are."

i don't care
about beauty.
i care about hunger.
loneliness & starving
sisters. and i want to know
if the hunger that turns you
inside out
every day
is anything like
the famine
in me.
In the words of ~Sigma-Echo-Seven:
The metaphor is mind-boggling in its accuracy

CigarettesMy New Orleans muse smiles;
Bourbon Street quick-grin.

Mona Lisa Lolita; she splashes
through the stained-glass
of oil-slick puddles
wearing combat boots dark
as a Halloween new moon.

Her machine-gun lips are
half-drawn around dusk.
Cherry-red smile,
shimmering green jade eyes.
She can see through the clouds
if she casts them herself.

Dragon mouth against paper;
the serenade of the skeleton.
She burns stripped phalanges,
swears she's sucking down
Christmas.

Red wool, a bonfire;
she breathes all the warmth
she has never known.

Lungs of the phoenix,
blistering black;
breath full of gray ash.

One day she will wake ha
In the words of ~allsparra:
Frightening imagery, vivid metaphors, powerful.

Stephanie - Collab(I wrote us in free verse over every inch
of your tattered surface ).

you were the beatific grin
of a kindergartener high off oxygen,
mouth stretched wide as the entrance to hell,
black tongue bleeding virtuous sin like ichor.

(You taught me praying was for the weak
as I fell for your gypsum nails,
white teeth scrabbling over my chalkboard frame).

scribbled flesh tells no love story
but three layers of skin
worn thin along the length of our feverish bones.

(Garden flowers tucked away worms and dirt,
my ribs hoarded misspellings of my mother's name).

dipping your origami limbs into my ink
In the words of =LadyofGaerdon:
A gorgeous example of a well-executed
collaboration, in which each artists' skills
and styles blend into and complement
each other in perfect synchronicity.

Please check out our Featured Gallery, which shall be hosting all of ~winterkate's submitted works. Please also peruse her gallery for yet more awesomeness and remind her of what an amazing writer she is. Oh yes, and please

this article to spread the word!