New Week, New Goal Achieved!

With the first proper week of April completed, I want to take this time to highlight one important milestone in my wanna-be-career in poetry: my first submission in badapple.gay! My poem like animals is such a vulnerable poem to me because it's meant to be cringey, wholesome-esque and provocative with an open ending that encourages the reader to engage with the story and see themselves in a way in my narrative. Not that this actually happened (God, that would truly be messy...) but it's happened enough in the lives of other people I've met.

It's not easy to be yourself, and it's still not easy to call yourself whatever title and name because of society. Especially when your family is still rooted in their beliefs and traditions that goes against yours. It's difficult to express yourself, your wants, desires and needs when it goes against almost everything even you yourself believed in. It's a radical change to get to know yourself in a new light - what then are you supposed to do?

My poem seeks to address a few pressing issues: declining self-worth, societal norms, religious beliefs and trauma, familial relationships - there's quite a few. It's a simple story of getting caught in bed with someone you were taught not to be with. It's been instilled in you as ethically, morally and religiously wrong. Yet here you are in bed with the person who embodies the antagonizing beliefs. What then?

I don't have an answer. What my poem does is I provide context to the story, that the relationship between the narrator and his lover is more than infatuation or puppy love (perhaps a little closer to true, romantic love?) and imply a strained (or will now be even more strained) relationship with his father. There are metaphors at play, deeper themes to be unpacked, but the story remains as a reminder for the reader to examine themselves and the world around them.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that with this publication in bad apple, I feel like I'm closer to my goal of being more published in the literary magazines in New Zealand. I began with Tarot, and then (quite recklessly) to Circular and Symposia (still waiting on that one) and now to this - I feel more seen in my own country. The next goal will be a publication in Starling. That was the first magazine I ever published in and if I were to be published there, then I feel like my work is done and at the same time, there's a lot of progress to be made.

I don't want to be complacent and say that a publication in Starling is the end, but I still want to naturally move to bigger and grander things (not that Starling is neither of these). Achieving this will be a major milestone in my career, and if things go my way, then I hope that this isn't the end of it all. I still want to write more than just poetry here in New Zealand. There's still the rest of the world to see!

Check out my updated works page here.