Alright, fellow muses. I have been slacking off on my posts, but I have been generating a lot of creative-ness lately, so I only feel it’s fair to share some with you now. What I’m showing you is some items that I have submitted for BYU-Idaho’s Pre-Professional Conference. The PPC is an event put on by the English Academic Society every year where authors come and talk to students about–what else–writing. Then we go to workshops on how to improve our writing, careers in writing, yadda yadda. Students can submit their work beforehand and if they are selected, they give a reading of whatever it is. Pretty legit, huh? I thought so. Now I bring to you a few of the things I brought to them. Cross your fingers! I find out tomorrow if I’m in. But even if I’m not…I still got to “be mused.” 
This is what you would call a very, very, very long sentence:
Battle
Whirring, it’s dizzy, oh that merry-go-round-puking-is-not-what-I-do-best feeling, ivory, poaching (umbrellas protected me that day but most of the time, when it rains, I get wet), zero protection, bouncers and bodyguards, they’re stronger than a tree trunk, I’ve got no breath left and shin splints, dusty hair, grimacing, scar, muscles cramping, contorting, twisting, no help, can’t help, sliding off the rained-on roof brought the tears, screaming no words, losing a winning battle, heart barely breathing, give up, don’t give up, this marathon will kill me, yes you will leave and you won’t say goodbye; there was the day of reckoning when she asked for the phone number in the city square, everything looked grey and ancient but I really loved that smell, grandfather was walking down the sidewalk in China when a black-haired man approached him, he looked like the kind of man who vacuums barefoot, wringing his hands and staring at the grey hairs on grandfather’s head, but he asked if grandfather wanted to see some art he had upstairs, why not, grandfather said, and followed him up to an abandoned room; later on, when he told us this, my mind wandered to the swimming pool with the skylights above, where we would watch the airplanes flying to third world countries from O’Hara, and I thought about grandpa’s giant bruise, how he never told us how he sustained all his injuries until we noticed them there; now back to the beginning of the story, where grandfather’s story has some relevance, trust me, when I said please pass the salt and you threw it at my head, that was a terrible day, the kind when the bus purposely leaves without you and you’re only in 3rd grade, when the tunnel beneath the street is dripping with moss, right after another rainstorm (we were in Oregon after all), my older brother laughed so hard his freckles began to disappear, and the slippery pavement began to look like a battleground; that was the day that I realized the street was like the front lines, and when ambulances screamed in the night and mom or dad wasn’t home yet, my heart got a bit sick, thinking about how grandpa got lost in the strange man’s apartment and didn’t tell us, or floating face up in the pool, or falling off the rooftop, and especially walking home in a perfectly harmless rainstorm, that’s when all the everythings started to make sense, and I felt incredibly sorry for saying those meaningless things I said to my best friend, who probably thought about the trampoline accident, the sprained ankle, the tomato stains on the “witch’s” windowpanes, and also the prank when nobody understood the means to the end, but we thought we did, maybe then the overweight woman at the park would have known why we stared so hard at her, it was because her breathing was so heavy, not the obvious reason, the reason so many wars begin and end on unsteady soil; now the time comes to reveal the truth–I dreamt one night that a man was in surgery and he had his leg amputated, but it was accidental, and the nurses and doctors couldn’t put the leg back on, and that is precisely when the words “World War II” began to mean a lot more than what they said: standing on one leg, the only leg left, half-awake in a foxhole, lying in the death of others, Hitler committing suicide, Hitler committing genocide, Atomic bomb, faceless again, that was for Pearl Harbor, they said, then they let it fall, let it collide with human life, protect me, protect no one.
And here’s a poem I submitted (the form is a villanelle):
Closing In
Let’s give up dancing for awhile
Weaker from this flickering flame
Perhaps tonight it won’t beguile
Us, as we fall through the turnstile
Morning arrives with the shame
Let’s give up dancing for awhile
Giving up tastes like a long trial
Above a whisper truth came
Perhaps tonight it won’t beguile
Train’s hands still revile
And thunder the swollen frame
Let’s give up dancing for awhile
Throw the regret into a pile
Watch sleep say its name
Perhaps tonight it won’t beguile
Perhaps I won’t find the aisle
Where dances the flame
Let’s give up dancing for awhile
Perhaps tonight it won’t beguile
