What’s written is alive,
so live in literary presence,
for when we stop being written, we die.
Someone told me once to write a novel, or
maybe they said, schreib einer Roman,
and I must have misheard them because
now Roman writes and lives and breathes
in literary presence, morphing themself into
stories about banshee wails and critical fails,
evil mages and arcanum ages on crammed pages,
because storytelling drips off their tongue:
inky,
metallic
salty
like debates with spiteful study buddies in library halls
illuminated by those emerald green banker lamps, the ones they pray they find at the thrift because the normal lights in their apartment give them a headache, and green sheen is the only way to pretend the dry chill and must of the stacks come home with them in a means beyond goosebumps and stolen paper.
“Maybe you’re broken,” someone told me
once in that inky enunciation.
The husk of broken reeked of mistimed sarcasm,
buzzing percussive in the air like a crashed-out crimson Chicago symbol:
four out of five stars. Not quite perfect.
Chipped.
Cracked.
Broken.
But the past tenses my shoulders—versions
of myself lost, crossed off. They only live
because I wrote them, wrote as them,
symbiotically living in the ink
or cursor blink of vitality that
scrapes across a crumpled page, because
when I write, I am alive.
I am alive because I write.
Amber Corkey is a fourth-year WRD major with a creative writing minor. Their Google Drive is stuffed with fantasy or sci-fi fiction writing, much nonfiction angst, and–despite their aversion to the genre–poetry, and their creative nonfiction work will be featured in Crook & Folly this spring.