begin: again (again)
By Alana Craib
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! I wish us a 2025 filled with more peace and more kindness, with more forgiveness. I also wish us all a 2025 filled with more resistance, more power, and more revolutionary love. Everyday is a New Year’s Day, so it is now time to start over. We are so happy to start this year with this poem by Alana Craib, reminding us how to begin again, and again.
begin: again (again)
start with the blood in your mouth
step one: spit it out
Smile! with clean teeth in the mirror big and bright and say ‘mommy mommy look!’
remember how much you hate the dentist?
do a good job flossing baby
put your teeth under the pillow tonight and I’ll come when you are sleeping
I’ll eat them whole for you
don’t worry
they can’t hurt your hands from under there
Question number two:
Do you have any good memories with your shoes on?
lush green grass dew speckled moss mud mud mud mud masks sticks and stones and fairie
homes
yeah I didn’t think so, throw your shoes into the tree top branches of that old sugar maple tree
the best we can hope for is a birds nest
the worst is hornets but we’ll take it good either way, promise
in three years time (or whenever you return home again)
with calloused feet and dirt streaked up the backs of your calves
you won’t be able to tell the difference and I’ll finally know how to call you by your
name again
Now what else is there?
What Else Is There?
yellow sunlight on the kitchen ceiling
soft sugar and butter straight from the bowl
(remember that flossing, baby)
underwear hanging to dry in the blackberry brush
my landlord will kill me if she sees that
well your landlord must not know a single thing about love, honey
How to: Begin Again
forget swallowing your baby teeth okay it’s like trying to swallow a falling star instead give them
to me
let’s plant them in the backyard garden with hydrangea and
tulips and
rosemary and
forsythia and
Sylvia Plath’s fig tree and
nurture the soil every night with the blood from our spit jar and good ol’ moon juice
when its ripe and ready go ahead and dig out your baby
(this is the same trowel I used to unbury you, sweet heart
and isn’t time beautiful that way?)
About the hot poet: Alana Craib (they/she) is a writer and artist from upstate New York. Her work is often concerned with matters of love, mothers and grandmothers, ghosts and memory, the kitchen, and the bog. Their writing has most recently been featured in Cleaver Magazine, the 2024 Brooklyn Poets Staff Picks Reading, The Plentitudes Journal, and Motif. Alana is a recipient of the 2024 Andrea K. Willison Poetry Prize. They hold a BA in Creative Writing and Literary History from Sarah Lawrence College. Alana currently lives in Providence, RI, where she is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Brown University. In their free time, Alana enjoys playing on the guitar, collecting sentimental objects, collage, and dozing.
Announcement: PTK is going to be on hiatus for a while. It is a new year and somethings have changed and some other things need to be considered. We also need to practice what we preach and we are all deserving of rest. I cannot tell you when or in what capacity PTK will be coming back, but I can promise you that someday it will.
Kelly is still on leave from the project, and has been since July due to personal and health reasons. Truthfully they probably won’t come back.
I (Larissa) have been running this project since then, but I am also dealing with a series of health, financial, and personal issues (aren’t we all?) which have made keeping this passion project going, especially without Kelly.
We had made a commitment to y’all with our open call, and we wanted to see it through, even if that meant pushing too hard. This commitment is now (mostly) done, and I have felt so privileged to have been able to work so closely with so many of you on these posts. Thank you so much. Your words mean the world to me, they have kept me going.
It is time to rest and reconsider now. I know I can speak for Kelly and myself when I say we are extremely proud of what we have accomplished so far with PTK. It’s been an amazing (if unsustainable) series of growth and poetic exchanges.
It is now time for a pause. A break. A breath.
It is time for planting new seeds.
I hope you will stay connected to us here. Like I said, I am not sure when or how PTK will be back, but we would love to have you here when we are. We will soon begin again (again).
Thank you for it all over the past three incredible years,
Your (always) poetry besties,
PTK