Writing in the Dark’s WANTED intensive is complete, but I still have pieces from weeks four through six to share with you.

Week four was about turning away from desire, which brought an interesting twist: I wrote a prose piece! I can’t decide if it’s a prose poem or a flash memoir/non-fiction piece, but I think that it works well in prose. (Though I say this without having attempted to rewrite it in stanzas.)

You’ll also notice that this piece is not about the ocean. While ocean-related topics did make the list of potential topics in the pre-write exercise, this particular memory felt the most vivid, which was a big part of the prompt.

I was also heavily inspired by week four’s reading: “Practicing” by Marie Howe . I love a girlhood poem, so I picked a memory/desire that leaned into that.

Below is the final piece, as I shared it in the comments over at Writing in the Dark. If you want to see the pre-write brainstorm I mentioned earlier + how this piece initially formed, I’ve shared a post on my Patreon (for both free and paid subscribers).

How We Howled at the Moon

I was Facebook messaging the woman my then-boyfriend cheated on me with. She was having a retail therapy session at Macy’s. I was working at my computer lab assistant job on campus, stuck inside with printer bugs I could barely pretend I knew how to solve.

She asked me what I would do next. I looked through the lab’s single window: a patch of wheat yellow brick, a fold of grass, a stretch of branch batting is green eyelashes, the sun casting a thin portal of light across the desk.

I could see us trying on dresses we couldn’t afford without her employee discount. Trading hastily written poems—who could write his lip-smacking mannerism better; how many of his nicknames for us overlapped: gorgeous, snookums, fresh.

“I’ll probably keep dating him lol”

I told myself he chose me—or would have, if he hadn’t gotten caught, and things naturally played themselves out. The texture of him over a woman I’d just met as familiar as the finger-smoothed keys on the keyboard. She texted me from a smart phone, and I was still using T9.

“Well, good luck,” she said. I knew her just enough to know she meant it.

I didn’t know what I’d turned away until her sudden death, half a decade later:

Late nights with red wine lips, bellies giggle sore. Sprawled across campus grass—her, watercoloring a June bug; me, writing the wind chime of her laugh into a poem. Book trades and clothes swaps—my sage Wet Seal corset for her sea foam green pants. She’d introduce me to Hendrix; I’d have hooked her on Stars. Would’ve gotten my first tattoo at nineteen instead of twenty-five—an Eisley lyric on the side of my ribcage, her hand squeezing mine to distract me from the sting. How we howled at a moon brighter without the constellations of some dumb boy’s freckles in our eyes. Coffee and wine. Mood rings and vinyl. Autumn to my summer.

I try to be grateful we met at all—a silver line dragging me, however briefly, out of the deep end. I carry her laugh in my wrist like a lucky charm on nights when nostalgia rumbles into thunder. I fulfill our promise to publish a book of poetry and slip her into it like a handwritten letter found in a used book. I stop writing men into gods. I listen closely to women.