This month’s writing prompt was Venus. Here we showcase all the responses that were submitted.
Venus prompt: A sacred Goddess, born in the sea, a pearl of ethereal beauty. Yet also shares her name with another, which orbits close to the sun, rotating with waves of fire and cloud. Precious in nature and myth, time and space. Iridescent, holographic, pure.
Enough
Pink moon, blue Venus.
I saw you on the bus.
That is enough.
Pink moon,
I saw you on the road.
That is enough.
I gave you all the class notes.
Pink moon, blue Venus.
I saw you with your friends.
That is enough.
by Inner Monologue (@inner__monologue__ Instagram)
Venus
Venus you ensnare me,
You are my light, my mistress, my love.
Every inch of my body is yours and yours alone.
I let you stroke my hair with your tender fingers,
Flowing through the strands like the surface of a warm bath.
Your orbit sways my famished caresses,
I obsess over what you bring me, how you serve me.
When the sun sets slowly,
Lighting the world with a soft honeymoon glow,
I know you are the one who rules every heartbeat.
I search the sky just to glimpse you,
The stars and moon are specks of shattered glass under you gaze,
They are nothing compared to your siren song of temptation and cruelty.
Venus my lover, your flesh is a summer peach,
Ripe enough for me to take a bite and let the juices flow down my chin,
Honey sweet and succulent.
Indulging in your flavour,
I savour every taste you release.
Even when the fruit has turned – rotten and bruised –
I keep on devouring, devoting and dedicating to your divine aphrodisiac.
Uttering your name like a benediction, I scream for you.
by Charlotte Hall (@charlottehall988 Instagram, @charlot62757682 Twitter)
Venus Personified
A kiss as delicate as a butterfly wing
Rough hands feel like silk on your skin.
Basking in a citrus flower scent.
A need so intense it chokes you, deeper beyond anything you have ever felt.
The shade of green.
A wine-like voice.
An ache so overwhelming that you feel like you are gasping for air and disintegrating.
Above your head, are seven stars.
A silver tree towering, larger than life, taller than any you have ever seen.
Desire. Burning, blistering, and extremely hot – destroying-
There were two moons dancing around one another in the sky.
She is a body licked by stars.
by Devika Bahadur (@devikabahadur Instagram, @BahadurDevika Twitter)
Sirena
The anxious seafarer might little revere
the gods, yet find himself bound to cliffs
that glitter. Sky weathered with the anxious cries
of a gull caught in the opal eye, sunken.
With sun-dried tongues, intact, they curse her
for galactic riptides, all violet-gleaming void.
For salt air that stings the brown iris blue
and for the missing, gorged by bottomless midnight.
Yet all she knows is the turquoise kingdom she keeps luminous
ode to pink-fished reefs and fairy basslets.
When the stars emerge, beam pearlescent night
the sirena, moon-lipped maiden, weeps her soft lament.
by Andrea Gerada (@andiesburgers Twitter)
Twin Planets
Twenty-three months, eight days, and six hours bridge the gap between sisters and twins. At three and four years old that gap went unnoticed, lost somewhere between the height difference and our identical pinafore dresses. At six and seven it was hidden still, as our grandmothers’ friends fawned over our similarities at communion. Whilst my red hair abandoned my ponytail to whisper into the nape of my neck at twelve, her brunette curls sat tastefully on her back. At fourteen, her eyebrows furrowed with effort as she powdered her face sullenly, covering with great determination the freckles she was cursed to share with me, because somewhere between eight and twelve, “Twins?” became the cruellest inquisition for my sister and I.
“Twins?” echoed in my brain far after our mother tucked us into bed. It ricocheted against our chest of drawers and the stuffed animals atop them tilted their heads in question. One Direction’s lips opened and closed in time from their papery imprisonment of our pre-teen obsessions and the light that crept between our curtains spelled out one letter, then two, then five and a question mark upon the walls. And the letters asked who I was, but only when next to her; they wanted to know about me, but only if there was an us, and so the echoes crept beneath my fingers even as they plugged my ears.
***
When my middle school science teacher paced up and down the rows of desks, our marked exam papers in hand, repeating “Comparison is the thief of joy”, I nodded, as though I had not already lived beneath comparison for a decade. Because in school I was someone else. Not a sister, certainly not a twin, just another failed science test in a stack of papers. Only this time my paper was not a fail, but a thick red ‘A’, circled carelessly so it ruled through the beginning of the title; “Our Solar System” becoming simply “Solar System”. I dropped not a single mark when asked about the intricacies of each planet, describing with great concern the rockiest and the hottest, the coolest and the smallest. Taking extra care with Venus, earths sister planet: its “Toxic twin”. For though my teacher had spent the term comparing Venus to earth, teaching of its uninhabitable nature, its temperature far too hot and its atmosphere too toxic, I preferred to take interest in its quirks. I wrote of its rotation (the only planet that did so clockwise) of its yellow clouds, and of how it shone so brightly that it was the second brightest in the whole night sky. Sure, it wasn’t earth, but it was wonderful.
Just as I did not desire Venus to rotate anti-clockwise, perhaps it was not necessary for me to cover my freckles and curl my hair. And perhaps, just as Venus shines amongst Mercury, Saturn, and Mars, I too simply need to find my place, knowing that one day I can return here, and when someone asks us, “Twins?” I can smile, and tell them about the twenty-three months, eight days, and six hours that separate us.
by Eloise Parry (@/eloiiserose Instagram)
twins
venus – earth’s opposing twin
when earth has seen a day through
you have lived through two hundred and forty-three
two hundred and twenty-five days it takes you to orbit the sun
a whole year before the sun sets in the east
and rises in the west
you spin backwards on your axis
in a burning heat of four hundred and seventy five degrees
volcanic craters on your surface
but once you had a sea
who left you, eventually
you’re too hot, girl
your sea melted into vapour waves
evaporating off into space
you’re uninhabitable, nothing can stand you
you’re fire when we are rain
this duality between us
we have called
Love
Goddess
Aphrodite
we drowned your fire in our oceans
and wrote your charred surface
as water with a seashell with a woman in
and yes, I also looked for myself in depictions of you
I keep iridescent shells with pearls and paint my nails champagne
slip dress and venus razor blades in my purse
I listen to binaural beats of Aphrodite
to attract sublime beauty
my better sister, other half
you are, in truth, a hell
melting lead and space probes and
men who try to enter you
I could say you are
women’s rage
made intoxicating, a siren or mermaid
a holographic chimera where men fall in to drown in fire
and burn in water
or I could say you are a barren woman
stripped of the waters of youth you are
suffocating
I think I have rejected you
I do not know how to navigate through my fire
and the idea of water which left me
burning
if I can be both water and fire
fish and flame
I could navigate the paradox of being a woman who is both
volcanic ash scars on the womb and
deep sea amniotic fluid
both conch shell necklaces
divine feminine meditations
three abortions in
the contradictions of being fish tail
plaits and sleep paralysis demons
I fall asleep and dream of being
both earth and venus
sacred twins
by Megan Robinson (@transientspaces Instagram, @megan_molleyflo Twitter)
Embrace of the Sea
Blessed is the woman who lives by the sea
Within you, within me
Curious is the child who traces their toes among the shore
Within you, within me
Peace embraces the skin that graciously bathes in the salt
Within you, within me
The waves will carry us further into our journey of life
As the sea is within you, within me.
by Jasmyne Labeau (@thejasmynejade Instagram, @Jasmynelabeau Twitter)
Next April
arrive with the buds, O Apogee of beauty
Arrive with the waves, O Angel of small death
Bulrushes part and sway as Zephyrus’
moist breathe urges you to gold-garlanded Horae
Arrive in flight like the roses marrying the
froth beneath the scallop,
Forever under your eternal gaze, it’s your
gaze I want, let me be inadequate with
want like Paris on Ida.
Arrive with Inanna’s garments from
an underground that
couldn’t contain her immortality,
Arrive with fortune an Emperor’s
coin can’t give an outsider.
by Benedict Hangiriza (@HangirizaBen Twitter)
swim press 