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Josie Angel
Category
Poem
1
6/24/25

To A Character On a TV Show…

To a character on a TV show who killed herself:

 

I needed you to fight

and give me hope to keep fighting.

 

I’m angry that you gave up.

I’m angry that part of me

often wants to give up.

 

I needed you to overcome your circumstances

so I could feel inspired to overcome mine.

 

I can’t sleep tonight

thinking about you,

thinking about how alike we are,

thinking about how alike I don’t want us to be.

 

I keep slamming into the same walls,

the same hopelessness,

the same feeling of being trapped,

the same feeling that

life is never going to let me have

what I want and need.

 

I’m so fucking mad at you.

Because I related to you.

And the only solution

you showed me

to a situation like ours

was death.

 

I’m exhausted.

I’m so fucking tired of fighting.

I’m so fucking tired of trying.

 

I was excited to see a woman like me

escape from the clutches of darkness

I thought you were drawing us a map to freedom

and instead…

 

I hate your creators.

They are shitty gods.

They couldn’t dream a better ending for you.

 

I write out alternate futures and timelines for myself.

I wish I could believe in just one of them.

 

Fuck you for dying

and for choosing death.

Fuck you for plunging me

into despair

on a night when I was only seeking escape.

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Registration photo of Winter Dawn Burns for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Winter Dawn Burns
Category
Poem
4
6/24/25

Burdens and Holdings

Burdens and Holdings:

 
This burning heat is a thirsting pain of unmovable wisdom and a dark dawn that sours glass against the cold of Winter. The hypnotizing zephyr of juvenescence is nothing without the kiss of the relentless desert grit.
To differentiate between indices and the nuclear breeze is like sailing through a broken oxbow while remembering that dances aren’t dreams and footprints aren’t seen once the ocean washes them away. Oh, how can we afford to invest in the forgotten traveler who searches for the resolution to the chorus of crying gulls and the promise of unsalted waters? And how can a poet know what to save when nothing means anything at all or everything means something to someone but not everyone? But still, we continue to conjugate time with gifts of flowers, feathers, and bones in the hopes that we will not have to walk through fires to get back home. When the seed surfaces, maybe we will see where the door goes. Or maybe we can move through the lens of a language that sounds like a million sweet lullabies. Or maybe a cease-fire will mean something. 
 
©️Winter Dawn Burns
Registration photo of maddie mitchell for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
maddie mitchell
Category
Poem
2
6/24/25

seeing and seen

poets have eyes
they have opened
stay peeled, even as they dry
without tears left to spill
for those chosen to be blind

 

telling how poets always see
literate, read, written, and weeping

Registration photo of Philip 'Cimex' Corley for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
P.C. Cimex
Category
Poem
1
6/24/25

Oothacal

                “It’s really something to see…….constantly…

                how many people…..are dying for lack..
                of an encouraging…word……..
                and how easy it is to provide that…if you’re careful,
                you know, give credit where credit is due
                and to say…….you’re a net force for good 
                if you want to be.”                

                                        –Dr. Jordan Peterson to Piers Morgan
                                        while choking up in tears

 
The male loneliness epidemic.
Real thing or no?
An accurate description for a problem
or a misrepresentative umbrella
for several individual, if not wholly unrelated issues?
Veiled misogyny or a name to focus solutions on?
Are we taking care of our responses
when they cry men are lonelier than ever before!?
I remember when I was pushing back
against people screaming ‘All Lives Matter!’
but what, besides the realities of the problems at hand,
makes everybody’s lonelier! any better to say?

Because for me
it’s not so much about a house catching fire
and needing saving from oppressive flame
but a house sickened with insects
needing treatment for infestation.

Truly, we are a people further drifting apart
with the tectonal shiftings of infinite access,
but would you disagree that there’s a demographic 
clearly not coping as well with it all?
Young men running into the incongruence
of reality versus the media they consume–
movies, games, pornographies,
and all the anachronistic ways
male role models say to be a man;
how divorced all of that is becoming from daily life,
how easy it is for one to lose their way.
Is this something that should be denied?

Yeah, maybe the words are wrong
and yeah absolutely, men are using those words
to justify bad behavior, but change
doesn’t and never has happened in a day.
Is it not better to keep a conversation going,
to maybe find and refine more effective solutions?
Ways to assuage unemployment, uneducation,
emotional damage and the many atrocities
men will commit against themselves?

‘Cause when we’re getting to those points
I don’t really care what it’s all called,
I just want to see issues actually addressed,
whether that’s simply giving a man space to speak
or, particularly by the good and wise men,
to show the new way that masculinity should be.

Or, you know, you could keep chasing them
back into the shadows
where they’ll bond in commiseration
only to return for next elections
in greater and stronger numbers.

Registration photo of Shaun Turner for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Shaun Turner
Category
Poem
25
6/24/25

Field Report of Breathing

Feel the Apple Store: more than wet—  
even the glass seems to sweat, 
condensation curl like slow script 
down its spine.  
 
Shuffle through automatic doors.  
Wear your O₂ like a necessary ghost,  
tank small, insistent across your shoulder
like a vestment. Hear your breath, 
a mechanical psalm.
 
Carry your body’s hitch,  
its visible machine  
among many sleek brethren.
White walls thrum with youth.
The fluorescent cold a respite
of sorts, tables slick as bone.  
 
The aluminum children  
tap screens like monks  
illuminating texts. Sweat 
through cotton, cannula  
cling—plastic taste like a tongue depressor,  
Texture in your nose  
a hard warning. 
 
Recall the ability to stand
long enough to browse.
 
Watch a Genius blink, tap fast  
on a tablet-sized grief.  
Hear a man 
cough into his sleeve.  
Catch another 
spit low hate at the manager.
A woman lingers in summer wool,
fretting. 
 
You want to go home, too–to return 
to its familiar walls, the smell of smoke,
where just one breath turns so easily
into another without this tender tether. 
 
So lay your boss’s QR code  
on the counter—warm  
as fresh eggs.
 
A child’s scream–PLEASE!
 
So watch a receipt unspool  
like a scroll or banner.  
Say Thank you.  
You can leave into the heat.
Registration photo of N. D for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
N. D
Category
Poem
6/24/25

Plague

each memory of you tugs mercilessly on my heartstrings,
a choir of church bells echoing through the vacant halls
we once filled with spirited merriment

their cacophonous chorus, twisted and mocking,
ghosts of once sweet music
left to scream into nothingness

 

Registration photo of Haley Biddle for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Haley Biddle
Category
Poem
4
6/24/25

What Kind Of Woman

She laughs. 

She laughs as if her eyes are small pennies 

that disappear into the mouth of a spiral wishing well. 

She does this often — 

it catches you like the optimistic flu.

She loves. 

She loves everyone and hates no one. 

She loves to give with grace and surprise your face. 

She is the beaming sunflower that grows taller than us 

both.

She listens. 

She listens before she speaks — 

a practice of many, a talent of few. 

If you listen, 

you’ll notice she says more than she doesn’t, 

but only truth escapes her lips.

She lingers. 

She lingers in the words of her letters. 

Her blood is made of pencil lead that pumps every page. 

She stretches her spine in the card catalog, 

a collection of intentions to be brought to life. 

She lives. 

She lives in the honeysuckle hum of the rural hummingbird. 

The whistle of the land sings her name. 

All that she is 

is all that she was –

unforgettable.

Registration photo of Kathy Rueve for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Kathy Rueve
Category
Poem
6
6/24/25

The Circus

The most exciting event of my childhood was going to the circus.

The smell of cotton candy, peanuts and buttered popcorn

mingled with the snap of the whip and the frenzy of lions’ roars.

Silence reigned as we watched the barefoot woman on the trapeze  

release and fall into the arms of her partner who dropped her.

She seized his foot and climbed to his shoulders then waved.

A white faced clown with a red nose circled the tent on a unicycle,

oblivious to everything until he ran into a pile of green poo 

next to a trumpeting elephant standing on hind legs.

The clown fell headfirst into the droppings,

sat up and wiped his eyes, then pulled a

bucket from his pocket to pour water over his head.

Our ungainly gang of nine-year-olds roared with laughter.

The ringmaster, his top hat askew, blew a whistle and pointed to

horses circling, their riders doing back flips and handstands.

After they exited, tigers followed in a line to sit at attention.

The largest opened his mouth to let the trainer insert his head.

We held our breath, the clown juggling pots and pans.

Then we yelled ourselves hoarse as stilt walkers turned

balloons into dogs, releasing them to descend on the crowd.

Years later, I am the only one who wants to go when the circus comes.

The clowns are not funny, my friends say, the acrobats worn and old,

I go alone and sit with my bag of popcorn, checking my watch

while trying to recreate those feelings of exhilaration and excitement.

When I leave, I am much older than when I entered,

disillusioned by the unraveling of my memories of enchantment.

Sylvia Purvis
Category
Poem
6/24/25

masking

you tell me that i don’t seem like someone with borderline personality disorder

i tell you that i mask 

i mask so well that sometimes i don’t even know what i am feeling 

i mask so much i never know when it’s okay to take it off

i spend so much energy masking that i sleep for twelve hours a night 

i mask to survive

the day, the stigma, the sterotypes

i mask to save my friendships 

because i know i am too much 

when i don’t mask 

disaster strikes, my world crumples

no one knows what to do when i am not okay 

trick is, i am never okay 

i just mask to save my life 

& to save your day 

Registration photo of Jerielle for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Jerielle
Category
Poem
4
6/24/25

Authority

It seems like everyday I hear 
some tidbit of trendy information 
repeated as the truth

and the person repeating
has only heard it from someone else,
someone who thought that they were right. 

The topic has been left unexplored,
the knowledge not in question
repeated as the truth
wholly unexplored
unearned and unchallenged. 

I don’t see the point in correcting.

I don’t want to hurt the fragile egos of the masses, I don’t need to say “Have you considered…?” or “My training and my experience have shown me something different”

There are too many people who think they are authorities, and too many people listening to them and believing that they are. I have always attempted to test every theory, always questioned any truth, particularly if I am to repeat it without a disclaimer.
Do not accept what is handed to you. Do not accept what you do not know for yourself. 

Do not even accept that your own mind has not skipped this important step.
And even if you do test, do consider there may be more knowledge, additional truth
that you are unaware of.

Before you open your mouth
to spread one more fact you heard from a person who heard from a person on the internet,

consider that it is just a theory. An untested theory. No matter how apparent was the authority. It is often the authority who is posing as authority. In fact, this is what authority is mostly,

-posing. 

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