NEW! FIVE new poems of mine are newly appearing in American Poet! AND FIVE more new poems of mine are newly appearing in Bionik Pussy!

Happy end of September and happy poetry power! 

As of Sunday September 28, five new poems of mine are newly appearing at American Poet! 

The first three are interconnected or maybe they all are in a way. Past memories, dreams, interpretations...

Here are a few lines from one of those poems, followed by a link to all five poems:


"I still forget certain words sometimes
or maybe it's a misperception or maybe it's all a dream.

In one of my recent dreams, pets who misbehaved
were cut in half like they were part of an evil
carnival sideshow. Their skin was sliced off.
They were dissected to teach us a lesson,
but what was the lesson?"

in my poem "PAIGE THREE"

read more of my poetry in American Poet HERE - https://www.americanpoet.org/2025/09/juliet-cooks-poetry-popular-american.html

***

Then as of Monday September 29, five more new poems of mine are appearing as PUSSY SHOTS in the new Bionik Pussy!

Here are a few lines from one of those poems, followed by a link to all five poems: 

"Dead Saints tortured and burnt are coming
back to life in my dreams tonight and I am
pissing on the floor in a strobe light dance club
while wearing a tight lioness costume whose color
reminds me of acid induced sunflowers

screaming again..."

in my poem "SMOLDERING OBSERVATORY"

read more of my poetry in Bionik Pussy HERE - https://bionikpussy.com/2025/09/29/pussy-shots-juliet-cook/

and so on and so forth

 I used to think that there was always a very valid and potentially powerful point to creative expression via poetry and art (and sometimes I still think so and still feel that way), but a lot of my creative expression is very personal (which I'm usually fine with, because that's how I write and create).

But lately I've been thinking that even if my poems are a meaningful form of expression for me personally, they might not have much of a larger purpose (and they're still valuable to me if they don't but...) I mean, who wants to hear a middle-aged, middle-class white woman go on and on about her body issues and her anxiety and her depression and her anger and her relationship issues and her uncertainty about whatever the heck love is and so on and so forth?

Granted, I'm technically poverty level, but I don't feel poor, so I'll always consider myself middle class. Granted, I'm technically disabled, but I don't directly focus on that in my poetry and sometimes it upsets me when people seem to encourage me to focus MORE on my disability in my poetry, because maybe I already AM focusing on it in an indirect, semi-abstract sort of way. Sometimes I think that me feeling like I barely exist and that I'm not particularly meaningful is a sort of side effect of the brain damage of my stroke, because I don't remember feeling so pointless when I was younger, but maybe I always felt that way, or maybe I would have felt that way when I got older anyway, whether or not I had undergone such a brain fluke.

But it makes me feel a bit weirdly uncomfortable if people seem more interested in my brain damage rather than my poetry - because of those two parts of my life, I most definitely prefer the poetry, whether or not it interests many others. 

Reverting back to child circles

Sometimes it's frustrating, my brain feeling like it retracted back to how it was when I was a little girl. I was brimming with creative flow, but could visualize my ideas/thoughts/feelings/creative concepts better than I could figure out how to express them the way I wanted to with words.

Over the years I worked my brain up to become uniquely, precisely, descriptively expressive in my own chosen word-based way - but then I lost some brain power. In more recent years, my mental uniqueness did not disappear, but the precision of my word-based expressive abilities dissipated.

Negatively speaking, sometimes it really bums me out that I can no longer express things as well and specifically as I used to.

Positively speaking, sometimes I try to craft my visuals into a different form of art, whether or not I can explain it with words.

Semi-neutral speaking, I don't really know what to do with these other forms of art. (I can creatively entitle them.)

I remember myself down in the dark, dank basement, telling myself fast visual-based stories inside my own head (but unable to extract them with words out of my own head), walking around in circles.