By Chelsea Zhu and Katie Song

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We capture little moments of friendship, revelation, beauty, and stillness while exploring the brief and transformative form of haikus.

staircase—
constant movement 
of new faces

footsteps rippling
into sound—
the rhythm of raindrops 

a new wash on
my lips, perhaps berry or brown
let’s try again

snapshots of last september
conversations lost
in the lunch courtyard

soft crunch of
autumn leaves
drifting cherry blossoms

during a sunshower
white keys
from my neighbor’s piano

shoreside—
younger me holding
mason jar 

sleek in black and grey
I stretch like we all used to
breathing in the day

I hit the green button 
to hear friends, many miles away,
we squeal on the street

in a charter bus
i watch two geese 
cross the road

by the river creek 
two names fading
on a paper boat 

every month I trim 
my nails—cut
down memory

lemon berry buttercream
16, 21, 24 candles
a flame for one

marking my progress
with pen on paper
my feet on the floor

new mascara bottle—
I watch an eyelash fall
in the bathroom mirror

I click on a flight
picturing the faces
I’ll see at the end

Here & Now: Girls Write Now 2024 Anthology

Do not read this book, unless you want to know what real humans are thinking. Taking poetic license to express things in ways that make AI fear it will be replaced by humans, the stories in these pages reflect the here and now: a collective urgency as the pandemic recedes, the world overheats, wars overwhelm, and the national discourse is conducted in a language far from love. In these pieces, cooking unites families, supermarkets become places of connection and adventure, neighbors evolve into mermaids as the sea levels rise, and every month nails are trimmed to cut down memory. The smallest gifts in life become impossible blessings of gratitude. There is a sense of battle with the norms and an understanding that things are not right, but they will be. This anthology is evidence of a future worth fighting for in which the long tradition of building community through the written word is upheld during the highs, lows, and everything in between.

read here & now

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Process

After discovering how many common interests we share as a pair, we decided to combine our experiences into one written piece by first jotting down the little moments in our lives related to the theme of ritual and routine. Then we each used these notes to write our own freeform haikus, packaging our rituals into bite-sized prose that could convey to a reader what we each individually get up to throughout the mundanity of our days.

Experimentally, we then combined all of the haikus we wrote over the course of a few observational weeks, simply trusting the piece would come together. Piecing together our stanzas like a puzzle, we found the common thread that weaves our stories into one, moving our amorphous narrator from stillness to longing to motion.

While to a passing stranger, the life and lessons of a 15-year-old in Washington D.C. and a 24-year-old in New York City would presumably be vastly different, this writing process and collection of poems have only affirmed what we knew all along: perhaps it’s in the liminal spaces where our worlds collide.

As we merge our two voices together in poetry, we’re springing magical connections. We’re catching floating snapshots of our life. We’re skyrocketing our words into miracles.