PbW Chapbook | Vo. 2

PBW CHAPBOOK VO.1

Copyright © 2024 by Penned by Western All rights reserved.

Printed in Canada

Thank you for being a part of the authorized edition of this book and complying with copyright laws by not producing, scanning or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

First Edition: April 2024

Penned by Western Press London, ON /25

Thank you to the writers, the poets, the authors, the readers, the dreamers, but most of all, thank you to the Penned by Western members who make our club and our chapbook possible. Thank you for making blackout poetry during Clubs Week. Thank you for coming to workshops on everything from mystery to humour to fantasy. Thank you for filling our website and Instagram with your wonderful words. And thank you for contributing to our second-ever chapbook.

The Penned by Western Chapbook is a yearbook, a celebration, and a monument. It is filled with our members' best work, deepest secrets, and most sacred thoughts. I am so incredibly proud to be a part of putting these words to print, and I would like to thank each and every person on the Penned by Western Executive for their contributions to keeping our club and chapbook in perfect order.

Reading this chapbook will take you on a journey from a small London apartment to a long-forgotten church, from a rental house in disarray to a tropical coast. It will lead you through questions of anger, beauty, betrayal, and love. It will make you laugh, and it will make you cry, but most of all, I hope it will make you feel.

So, sit back, grab a cup of tea or your preferred reading snack and enjoy the PbW Chapbook: Volume 2.

Yours,

Gray Brogden | Editor and Penned by Western President

All The Poets I Know

- Izzy Sibert

All the poets I know can’t stop writing about dead dogs. They’re still finding fur in the lint trap after eighteen months. They don’t buy peanut butter because the empty jars hurt. There are kilometres of trails behind their houses, lush stretches of forest they can’t walk anymore.

All the poets I know can’t stop writing about absence and the grief they guiltily carry long after the body is gone. They’re writing death: slow and liquid in the veins, or angel-bright in headlights, or gentle in the backyard behind the tool shed where the ivy grows thick.

All the poets I know are writing about noticing, about the smudge of a wet nose on dark glass. They are cradling themselves in metaphors until the death of their childhood shrinks, softens into the quiet whimper in a dying dog’s throat,

as if loss is something that has a beginning and an end and is not a tiny visitor each morning a new and loyal friend.

Taylor

Your laughter is where kids come from. The sparkling mirth, that darling dirge, and my hardened words. Your shape containing the song my Metronome clangs its stiff arms to. That disarmed truth finding myself blade-deep on your handle. An ample amble into your arms reach, your shard piece slotting into my empty place like a glove.

My light up love how you glow in your shell. How I lack the words how the words write themselves.

Questions You Forgot to Ask

- Gray Brogden

I think there’s a bed in London where we still sleep. An apartment that still smells of alfredo sauce and tiger lilies. I’ve been having a hard time with linearity lately. I just don’t see how something like us could ever really be over. Every once in a while, usually while listening to Maisie Peters, I think about your packed suitcase. I think about all the things we said and all the things we didn’t. All I ever wanted was to be the answer to your questions, but you stopped asking. And all I ever dream about is the feeling of your arms or visions of you kissing other girls in other bars. I guess I was just your prequel. But when I told you goodbye, I didn’t think you’d believe it. I’m still waiting by the phone with an answer. But you never call.

Dimensional Silence

- Claudia Kindrachuk

Human screams cut a gaping rift in the universe, Tearing the nameless fear limb from limb.

We live and breathe politics,

Guilt and anger and grief

Mixed in one bitter drink.

What good is it to fear what’s out there

When there’s so much to fear right here?

Consolidate your resources, Worry about the rest later.

Chew your tongue to a pulp,

Dig your nails in ‘til your palms bleed.

Nothing is nothing is something is everything

In the face of incomprehensible greed.

Dissecting a Rental House

- Chloe Jung

I wrench open the clenched jaws of the house to find wilted foil balloons on a sickly yellow wall.

HA PY B RTH AY, sing creaky floorboards hoarse from overuse. Through the house’s clotted arteries, I find a tiny, grimy bathroom, complete with a toilet ringed with slimy, sticky mold, burned into my brain. I’m in the bloated belly of the house now, in a kitchen rotting with five bottles of dish soap in competition for least drained. The heart of the house hurts my own, squeezes it in a gnarled palm because for $750 a month, I can choke out my lungs’ pleas for sweet air, my eyes’ desire for pale light. Should I sign a lease in the blood of my bank account or with my tenant tears?

A Sermon from a Forsaken Church in a World Long Gone

- K.J.W. Johnson

Something feels off about this church. The interior is full of scattered remnants of things left in a hurry. The balcony groans and slightly shifts as if readjusting due to discomfort in staying still for so long, and I wonder not for the first time if being an urban explorer is worth it.

“When this place was abandoned,” I say to myself. You find a forgotten Nintendo DS that, when powered on, still plays the discoloured frames of a Kirby game.

In the back room, there is a fridge, and you open it. The fridge light comes on, and a half-eaten mummified meal lies unfinished.

There are also lights upstairs, and we come across a circle of metal chairs, some tipped over, some pushed away. In the middle of the deformed circle sits a single television. The screen shows white static like blizzardous snow. At first, it looks to be nothing more, but when you squint, you can see the image of an empty cave; all I see is a gaping mouth.

A nursery comes next. You switch on the lights. On the far end of the room is a chalkboard that reads:

Loss lies in the Heart of Love

When leaving through the basement's little grass-level window, you see scraps of torn lined paper that read: the end times are over, and the rapture never came circa 2008… You ask why that makes me shiver while we make our way home during another unprecedented heatwave.

My Forehead is a Dog

- Iris Zhao

my forehead is a dog it barks all night (sounds like heavy snow) and drags my memories around on its back an early morning, a glimpse and uncertainty on its back

a fog, a little trail and some laughs soaked in water (they look so much like the doomed failure in my blood) and in the place I cannot see it eats the words I created like eating the sun

A Bluebird’s Song

- Xiohan Yan

I live caged in a sad man’s heart, and sometimes I do not mind. The man is not an unkind man, merely a sad and tired one. He drinks and he smokes and he lies in bed with his eyes staring blankly at the wall. He lies so still sometimes I think he ’s dead, but he never is. Always, always he eventually turns towards me so that we can see one another. When I look into his eyes I see his sadness and I remember that I love him again. I sing my love to him it cheers him up and for a moment, I too am happy.

But in the morning, when the daylight comes and waves to me from outside the blinds in the window, I remember the outside world and then I do mind that I am caged here, in the depths of his heart where no one else can see. I want to stretch my wings, I want to say hello to the bartenders and the grocery clerks, I want to be free. So I tell him I love him and that I will return, but he does not believe me. He never believes me, and so I never leave.

Silence and Violence

- Siddharth Maheshwari

The playlists are voluminous

But they all sound empty

I’m losing faith

in systems and order

Polite friendships are fake

Real ones seem harder than ever

What angst fuels my rage?

It powers my veins

Anxious twitches as my heart races

But I know this is not fear

It is drive, bursting through my fingertips

It is impatience, trembling my body

It is boldness, choking my throat

Beckoning my screams

Urging me to bring the house down

Set fire to the rain

Before my tears douse the flame.

Burned At The Stake

- Hailey Shepstone

December 1st, 2023 9:50 am - 10:00 am

I stare into the faces of the lives that I have saved and watch as tears form and eyes redden. A protector, they mourn, an enemy they've gained.

There's no words left inside my chest, no words that I can breathe to bear witness to my grief grief, that doesn't even belong to me.

And my saves have now become losses, and my losses defeats; they pile up like quicksand designed specifically to drown me.

And the match is struck, a traitor, tied up, and finally there is calm; finally there is quiet. People have been killed for less.

It is their turn for retribution. Their time to be saved.

(That is what it means to betray the ones you love.)

JOB INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY ST.

PETER. - The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

- Aanya Pereira

INTERVIEWER. tell me about the last time you called home. it was good. always nice to catch up with family again.

INT. and how did you feel about having to press that call button, knowing no one else would do it for you? it’s a call button. can’t say it’s exactly that hard. can we move on?

INT. sure. do you normally make it a habit to lie to everyone around you? are you ever planning on telling the truth again? i mean, it’s always a bit nerve -wracking, trying to compile every wayward-thought, what tone to use when i hear beta, khaana theek se khaaya, whether it’s ‘yeah, of course i’m eating okay’ or ‘i thought you understood that i’m not making it out’.

INT. at what point in your life did you give up on being human? i don’t think i ever knew how to do it at all & if i did, i know damn well i wasn’t good at it. all i ever do is watch the time go by and pray that this all ends a little faster. all i ever do is keep asking a sky that won’t answer for a clock-wind back to when i could just pretend to know the name of the thing in my skin, for a manual on how to be a good friend-daughter-person-sister, for the gavel of time to shatter my body like a lightbulb in a paper bag and every bad dream i’ve had to spill out my blackened mouth and red wrists and roil into the streets like the river of rot that i am. it would be sunrise and the frost would shimmer as the bough bends, birds branched across pine and oak, and i’d hope that i will not be saved. i would hope that no one finds me.

INT. thank you for coming in. we’ll get back to you shortly.

Echo - Matthew Langdon

I am an echo

I’ve been here before

Burned before by you

Watching as everything collapsed

And I still want to start again

I want an echo

I want to be back again

The burning is the desire

I think of you and I collapse

Can we start again

We were an echo

We’ve done this before

There is a burning pain I feel

As everything collapses around us

And I wish I never started

I was an echo

Before when I was with you

The burning gets worse when I

Think of what was lost in the collapse

And I still want to start again

The Rhythm of the Soul

- Afrah Fatima

It is but raining tonight, the stars hidden from sight. Rhythmic pitter patter upon my sil amplifies the static within my bony skull.

The rustling leaves welcome a calmer season. Soon the cold, making its way through their bony veins, droops them upon the ground.

The larks fly away to warmer seasons. They leave behind an empty deserted wonderland.

Now the snow falls. Magnificent crystals take up form, as glacial melts flow beneath hollowing eyes.

The chambers that once welcomed saturated sight are but tired, alas, from the plight.

The journey hath demanded an end. But fear not, for this heart, Mayeth still beat on.

Honeycomb

- Sonia Zhang

My baby, my love, my honeycomb. Honeycomb is you and honeycomb is the way you love.

On summer days, two lovers’ vacation in paradise. With my back beneath the sun in that gentle island breeze, your hands draw hearts around my tan lines, massaging sunscreen into my skin before we both dive in.

What a sight to see, my mother will say, a little mermaid and her prince swimming along Cuban coastlines.

Sea salt in my hair and sea salt on my tongue, sunshine kisses paint your hazel eyes as Westland pines, my guava pink blushes against ocean blue rushes and the two of us sipping on coconut fruit crushes.

At eighteen, I fell for you like a bee needs wildflowers. In return, you became my honeycomb.

My baby, my love, my honeycomb. Honeycomb is you and honeycomb is the way you kiss.

On summer days, two lovers slow dance in the ocean, their bodies holding one another for balance as their lips reach for each other like a honeysuckle grows to the sun.

With lips of floral nectar and golden ambrosia, you make the saltiest of waters taste like honeycomb. Your lips are sweet bee dreams, of a love brewed tenderly, like the lavender and honey tea from my childhood.

My baby, my love, my honeycomb. Your love is a honeycomb, and I am its one true keeper.

Friends Forever

- Alishba Farrukh

I am the clumsiest person you will ever meet.

I trip over everything and nothing; the unwanted bruises and cuts that appear from nowhere no longer fazes me.

I’m very clumsy, you see.

Yet despite this numbness, I know there is a sharp sting waiting for me. It is not until the blood trickles down my hands that I realize you’ve done it again.

I expect nothing less from you. (I am very clumsy, afterall.)

You crush me into two, walk all over me if you want and I let you do it because I’d rather have this illusion than be alone.

I’m very clumsy, you see. I still trip over my own feet and fall onto my knees to stay friends with you.

Unsafe Havens

- Nadia Parhizgar

Beds are a place of refuge.

My head rests on your shadow as I awaken. My vision blurs as I stare at the mess of throw blankets and body pillows. I draw you on empty walls like my fingers once did, along freckled skin and body heat. Compositions of lines and marks only I could see, I connect the dots between what never will and what could be.

Bitter reminiscences nestle into four corners. Echoes of your laughter haunt the air.

My body cocoons.

Laughs turn to yells. Beauty marks turn black and blue on my waist.

I press my hands against my ears to drown you out.

Beds are a place of refuge.

My vision blurs as I stare at the mess of throw blankets and body pillows.

As the scar of you fades, I drift back to sleep.

Meteors

- Alisa Anderson

The stars wink down at me from their blackened shelf, and I blink back, acknowledging each other in the Universe.

My tears begin to fall, so do the stars, echoing my Strife and Despair.

One by one my eyes shed my memories as the night sheds the countless wishes accumulated.

As my cheeks dry and the morning rises, we are both wiped clean,

The Sky and Me.