September 2023 - Featured Artist - Zee

About the Artist -

Zee is an overly hopeful Libra who resides in the Northeastern corner of the US. At any given point, you’ll likely find Zee belting Nate Ruess (pronounced ROO-SS) songs, baking for her loved ones, or word-vomiting their aspirations into Google Docs. They have been invited to feature at several venues around northern New England and has been one of the organizers at her home venue of Slam Free or Die since the summer of 2021. Zee’s work primarily dives into the subject of love in all its forms, including but not limited to grief, the complexity of interpersonal relationships, and the ways in which love weaves itself in and out of life like a precarious yet resilient thread.

She hopes that her work helps you find the light, because they want to stroll into it with you.

Additional Works -

Recent Feature at the Cantab Lounge - https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cu5zHfCqAct/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Featured Poems -

Accolades

Was the world the one to teach you how to drown without water?

Did they tell you that your name gets whispered 

many, many decades after you succumb?

If they haven’t, well…it does.

They sent me a paper-bound vessel

with your name whispering between the covers.

I used to remember how many times you got mentioned by heart,

but it’s since faded from memory.

Though but a characterization, 

that’s where it started;

the need to tell the world of a permanently overshadowed boy.

One that went to war 

because you didn’t care where you ended up, so long as you went.

So long as your father told your brother to get you 

“seasoned to the trenches”, 

you would stay out and turn slaughter into your wheelhouse.

No one told you it would combust in your face, 

because no one knew it would.

Why no one saw the gunpowder ashes,

spiraling across the breeze 

for three decades before your lungs had given out, 

I’ll never understand.

It’s not your fault your accolades didn’t get projected 

as hard as your brother’s, 

you were there just the same.

You don’t need to be outstanding to be seen or a scholar to be heard.

Here’s to you, the one who never got what he deserved.

The ship with slightly loose floorboards 

that can still sail out into the open sea.

It wasn’t meant to be a perfect vessel, 

otherwise there would be no skill behind the steering wheel.

Here’s to you, cornflower-eyed wonder.

I cannot think of any other way to tell you that you’ve haunted me.

You deserve to think of yourself 

as more than the “unlucky one of the family”.

I know that too well, I promise.

The further down the bloodline, 

the more the legacy snowballs into avalanches unto our backs, 

the more we stop being remembered for who we are,

rather, who was crafted before us?

rather, can we match the spotlight that glares into the crowns of our heads?

Maybe I’ll never know what you sound like, 

how your laughter probably took up your whole face, 

how your voice cracked when your family’s collective pair of lungs 

broke twice within a decade.

How you stayed at their bedsides, 

pushing yourself to the edge 

and trying to ease their journey to heaven’s gates 

with a facade of:

“it’ll be alright, you’re on the mend”.

How no matter what happened, 

you remained a force to drive others to see the next day, 

including me.

Here’s to you, this is all for you.

No need to share this seat, I crafted it just for you.

I hope it’s smooth enough, I’m not the best woodworker.

I kind of bruised my hands a bit and stained my cheeks with the colors.

For the fact that no one I know has given you a home like I want to, 

this is for you.

Whatever happens from here, I’ll understand.

I’m here.