Rebirth, No Birth
This theme asks what it means to begin again-- and what happens when beginning is not an option. What happens to the ones not born, the ones half-formed, or those too tired to return?
Rebirth, No Birth traces stories of cyclic grief, reimagination, transmutation, and refusal. These pieces were selected for the quiet ways they rupture.
A bruised, lyrical requiem for a love that corroded as deeply as it once nourished. This sea-drenched monologue mourns entanglement, devotion, and emotional exile -- drifting between the wreckage of abuse and the hunger for rebirth through song. A tide of longing, grit, and ghost.
A grief-wrought fable of trans friendship, schoolroom suppression, and the quiet brutality of "well meaning" erasure. Teacup speaks through shards of memory and metaphor, mourning a lost comrade while surviving in a world that punishes honesty. A three-part elegy soaked in steam, childhood, and defiance.
A balm and a reckoning. This poem catalogues the violence we're told to repress-- crying, screaming, quitting-- and clears space for them. It's Ok insists on the legitimacy of collapse, and finds a quiet, stubborn renewal in the ash. Not triumph, but tenderness. Not overcoming, but returning.
A death then an artful resurrection. Rebirth is a poem of sudden transformation: a life cracked open by unexpected beauty, intimacy, and the lunar pull of a single night. Here, rebirth arrives not with innocence but with knowledge-- of pain, of desire, and of art as a midwife of becoming.
In this tender, intergenerational portrait, a young girl listens as her mother recounts tram rides through Buenos Aires and Lisbon-- stories where grief, migration, and maternal silence pulse beneath the city's screeching rails. Rebirth emerges not in rupture, but in the shared stillness: a crooked finger, a cod croquette, a memory passed down like a light through a windowed car.
A quiet meditation on stasis and yearning, Ground Force captures the gentle grief of a life lived within lines—ledgers, routines, roofs. With restrained language, it considers the unspoken longing for something more: a different path, a flight not taken. This piece speaks to the kind of rebirth that never announces itself—just flickers behind glass, waiting
Soft elegiac, and filled with memory's bloom, Blossoms on the Trees reflects on the passing of time through seasonal shifts and childhood recollections. It resists the finality of endings, offering instead a subtle reincarnation of affection and presence. A gentle refusal of decay. A quiet, perennial return.
This reflective poetry piece interrogates the many emotional and symbolic deaths of a dream. Through metaphors of breakups, burials, betrayal, and quiet resignation, it explores how our ambitions slowly wither-- whether poisoned by neglect, sacrificed to obligation, or smothered in silence. The piece holds space for mourning and guilt while questioning the quiet violence of letting go. Raw, unflinching, and intimate, it invites readers to confront what they've buried and why.
