We Want Your Writing.

I Tell Myself, You Should Write a Poem

about a plot line from your favorite soap, call it 
“Marlena, Possessed. Again.” You should write 
a poem about gas giants not as failed stars but 
successful planets. About what scientists call 
exotic physics—gamma rays coming from 
the Sun, not from its core but from protons 
slingshot through space by supernovas. Or 
the real-life blob at the Paris Zoo, a self-healing 
organism with over 700 sexes. Or how when 
two tones of slightly different frequencies 
are played simultaneously, the listener will 
create a third to bridge the gap between 
them. You should write a poem that imagines 
that tone as the place beyond a poem, where 
the poem lives after it’s been read—a grassy hill 
on which it unfurls like a flower blossoming. 
You should write a poem about how, once, 
you tried to write a poem—an erasure—& just 
couldn’t do it, that there was something about 
seeing within the spaces between words that 
your mind could not grasp, even when it 
reached for the grassy hill, for the open petals 
of the flower, how all you saw was black. Like 
in that video where the star swallows a gas giant. 
Like what you saw months before your father 
died, every time you thought: future. You should 
write a poem where you put all the words back 
in, pull the planet from the sky’s dark mouth, 
an erasure of an erasure.
 
 

Ja'net Danielo

Ja'net Danielo is the author of two chapbooks, including, most recently, This Body I Have Tried to Write, (MAYDAY, 2022). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in swamp pinkDiode, Raleigh Review, Radar Poetry, and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press), among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net lives in Long Beach, CA. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.

About

Ja'net Danielo is the author of two chapbooks, including, most recently, This Body I Have Tried to Write, (MAYDAY, 2022). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in swamp pinkDiode, Raleigh Review, Radar Poetry, and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press), among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net lives in Long Beach, CA. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.