Universes, Drifting: A Temporal Haiku Collection
![Universes, Drifting A Temporal Haiku Collection](https://gwn-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/24124201/Universes-Drifting-A-Temporal-Haiku-Collection.jpg)
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
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.
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![Chelsea Zhu](https://gwn-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/15123848/cz-100x100.png)
Chelsea Zhu
Chelsea Zhu is a sixteen-year-old poet, writer, and journalist. Outside of writing, she's interested in exploring dance, design, and film. In her free time, she loves figure skating, traveling, and making new friends!
![Katie Song](https://gwn-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/15123848/cz.png)
Katie Song
Katie Song is a journalist and storyteller based in New York, NY. Korean-American and born and raised in Los Angeles, she is the founder of the activist student organization #ExpressiveAsians, where she sought to reclaim Asian American narratives through event programming. Katie is also graduate of Northwestern University, where she received her B.S. from the Medill School of Journalism, as well as an alumna of the Columbia University Publishing Course. She has worked for the WNYC podcast Snap Judgment and written for Variety, Metacritic, and TV Insider, where she currently works as their Web Producer.