One Week into Poetry October!

Tuesday, October 7th 2025: One Week into Poetry October!

It's been a week of Poetry October! I'm doing a weekly check-in to see how I feel about my works.

First of all, I'm loving the system of one poem a day. It forces me to write even when I'm not "feeling up to it." It pushes me to create consistently while keeping quality in check. At least in theory!

This is my Poetry October page by the way! Read through poems 1-7 first, they're pretty short!

For the first poem I talk about my beverage of choice, kombucha! I'm really happy with the metaphor of a scoby-as-child. It came to be because I harvested kombucha while my mom was out of town. I love the simple rhyming lines throughout the stanzas, it's very me

The second poem is about "Lots of vehicles break on the highway." So naturally I wrote about a reckless driver causing a pile-up. I used tarot imagery and had to double-check its meanings, sorry if you're a seasoned tarot reader and I got anything wrong. Whoops. In terms of style I like the brevity of this poem and the short stanzas. The last two line's is chef's kiss some of my best work.

Third on the chopping block is a weak one, I think. I talk about my experience in high school skipping classes to read an annotated poetry book at my school's "library" i.e. two bookshelves filled with mostly dissertations and STEM related books. I struggled a lot writing it, I kept changing structure and switching the words around but since I wrote this on the fourth (or maybe fifth?) day, I couldn't spend that much time on it.

The title "faith" is an easy one. Although I struggled with how to open the poem. I knew I wanted to talk about the well of zamzam. and YES I know it's a well and not a proper oasis but IT'S IN THE DESERT OKAY I can imagine it as such!!! Anyways. I wanted to write about a person that is too cocky, too skeptical, too reliant on miracles. It's a short one-stanza poem with religious themes that I kinda like.

"Life Hack" is pretty on-the-nose; it talks about my old childhood home being flooded and my dad using plasticine to cover up the gaps between the door and the floor. I don't know how effective this is, or how common this life hack truly is, but a cursory google search led me to some youtube videos showcasing the life hack. So it's not just my household that did that.

Number 6 is "Reunion," in which I talk about the constant change that we as people go through and how we cope with the change. The foil here is my friend, who once talked about liking their dark undereyes because it made them look like them. So I used the continuous metaphor of a changing face to signal a changing person and makeup as a means of "coping" with the change i.e. in denial about it or reclaiming youth. It's kind of up to unterpretation but I depict the speaker in the poem as insecure and less prepared for change compared to her long-time friend.

Lastly, the poem I wrote today was about ghosts. I knew I wanted to write about something to do with SEA ghosts and the Kuntilanak was a natural choice. It's about domesticity and patriarchal violence. I have some good readings (well, watchings) on the topic. This Kuntilanak video by Monstrum and another one in Indonesian from Remotivi. They're great primers on the subject! Highly recommend.

Oh, to wrap this all up, I love this poetry october challenge. My creative juices are flowing and I'm starting to write about things I would not have written otherwise. My plan is to continue to try out new formats and structures so I'm not stuck in my old ways, but there's nothing wrong with having a consistent style! :::