Considering that Writing in the Dark’s WANTED intensive ended in June, my poem for Week 6 is quite overdue. But here it is!

In Week 6: What are you? What do you lack? What could you be?, Jeannine Ouellette talked about how desire lives in the gap, that suspended space before satisfaction or resolve. Here are two quotes from her lesson that stuck with me and that I feel sum up this idea of desire in the gap:

. . . desire is not the obstacle to the life. Desire is the life. The gap is not the problem. The gap is where everything happens.

[. . .]

The question now is not whether the wanting resolves. It won’t. The question is what we will keep making in the space that it opens.

Per usual, there were multiple steps to the prompt, but the basic prompt was to write a poem titled “Wanted.” You can read my poem below.

If you want to read what I wrote for the pre-write exercises and my intial draft of this poem, I’ve shared a bonus-content post on my Patreon (for both free and paid subscribers).

Wanted

A poem worth the cost of language. A lyric
that takes you to the moon and earns the fuel
used up. Prose so tightly stitched, you can’t pull
a seam with the fine tweezers of curiosity.

​        Legs stitched together from inner thigh
​        to big toes. Sand nestled in the nooks of every
​        scale, all the places the water touches. If freedom
​        is someplace underwater, I want to hold my breath
​        and exhale my earthly body. Nowhere to rest
​        the baggage—just buoyancy.
​                Hurricane eyes.
​                A splash of bathwater.

An abundance of excuses for why
I have to drop everything and write the poem,
book a flight to the coast. For all the summer sweat,
teeth chatter, skin ripped from nail beds to be worth it.

A poem where every line is a question, and I am fluent
in the language of no answers. Like descent
and everything we still don’t know about
the ocean. Like dandelion wishes blown
to horizon, suspended in lacquered light
        like possibility
                preserved in aged amber.