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:

I have another poem from Writing in the Dark’s WANTED intensive to share with you!

Week five explored desire as a threshold for transformation. The prompt (and my poem) was inspired by James Wright’s “The Blessing,” which ends with the line: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

We were asked to write down four memories of being undone by something non-human. Two of my memories would have brought me back to the ocean themes I explored at the beginning of this intensive. But I chose instead to write about my encounter with a coyote.

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.)

The ocean theme continues in week three of Writing in the Dark’s WANTED intensive . Which makes sense because the ocean and marine life is my whole personality right now (I’ve included my current physcal TBR stack above as proof).

Week three’s theme was “The Language of Trembling & Objects of Displaced Desire.” The lesson and exercise were inspired by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , which I’ve heard so much about but have yet to read (yet another book on my TBR).

I’m behind in both completing “Writing in the Dark’s” WANTED intensive and in sharing the pieces I’m writing each week, but I guess that’s the beauty of self-paced workshops—you can complete them on your own time!

Below is the piece I wrote for Week 2: Sex Without Love and the Unruly Body. Note that despite week two’s title, the lesson and prompts were NOT about writing sex poems, though it was a route writers could take, if desired. The focus was more on the feeling of desire in the body. As someone who has no plans to have children, I was surprised that I wrote a poem about the body’s desire to feel the weight of a newborn baby. But I think I know where it’s coming from . . .

I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a paid subscription to Jeannine Ouellette’s “Writing in the Dark” Substack for awhile now, and was finally pulled to do so when she announced her current six-week intensive WANTED, which focuses on desire as a force in writing and in life.

Desire is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year. It was one of the things that brought me back to therapy in January 2025. I’ve felt aimless for awhile. Both in life and in my writing. And one question that seems to keep me from moving toward anything is: what do I want?