JUNE 2025: Jordan Byrum
"To me, being a writer is maintaining a sense of community you find amongst others whilst finding new ways to convey an emotion, a desire, a struggle, within words. It is both welcoming and terrifyingly challenging at the same time."
For June's Maryland Artist of the Month, Artists from Maryland is featuring Jordan Byrum! Below, you will find two poems, and her general writing process.
Jordan Byrum (she/her) is a Maryland-based poet and writer who loves writing about her feelings on identity, nostalgia, and anything in between that she finds interesting. When she’s not writing, she finds herself studying, reading, listening to music, or fangirling over 2000’s television show Supernatural. Currently, she has no published works, but she promises handsome rewards for their appearance soon.
his worn jacket from fort campbell
and his boots, mud-caked and whiskey-stained, stay at the front door.
You won’t pick them up again & they burn fierce holes into our apartment,
which is broken at the baseboards. I guess I write poems about this
because religious guilt & daddy issues are too mainstream. Red clay
instead of ash wednesday because cigarettes are for sinners, but
ash is my father. My poems are getting worse & I can’t write or
analyze deeply enough to make words have double meanings.
Sticky hotbed full of deception & tricky words too pronounced
to say aloud, yet fluorescent lamps keep me alive, tied to a
conjured halo. It keeps us up at night when I tell you about my father,
but I am speaking to your naked back. You’re an insomniac,
I know this. Sometimes, you’re afraid of me. We won’t
sleep. Again, a cycle I know. We are afraid to love, in it’s
coltishly newborn, celestial state. Stumbling over fallen stars
in the pasture. You’re fearful. I remember this now, as it happens
tonight: later, we get drunk off of the wine we stole from our pastor,
just something to take the edge off, & you tell me angels are
probably fake but i’m looking at you & thinking they are the
realest thing since religion was formed from desperate mouths
to soothe sapphic hopelessness. You tell me about your father
& about the boots & i tell you i’d live for you in return. Nothing
else but a thin, uncomfortable sheen of sweat & a veil of smoke
greets me, as is the heated haze of familiar august. You turn
around & embrace my body, skin to skin. For now, I wonder.
//
rust dyed
here again, i shovel away the soil and bless the land with pentecostal mouth. i scrape away & it
makes my fingernails bleed wine-red. it whispers hymns, as if all the time in the world rests
underneath the riverbank, where the secrets search for unfinished answers among the
lines of my throat. lakebed mud & river snakes coil until it is nothing but a tangle of
cordgrass sliding through my hands. once upon a time, we would squeeze fruit
until we were sticky & satisfied with tearing into flesh. pulp under our nails
so we smell sweet to deter the unworthy. what about now? we could crawl
in, share secrets & write prose about religion. we could become reduced
to lake creatures from myth, where the heavenly saints above paint
us as jezebels. we could reinvent history together & no one
would notice except the fanatics. there, i would spill out
my heart & its variations & its distinguished flaws.
& now? it’s 2 pm on a sunday afternoon & we
blend in with the churchgoers because sin
is an odd concept but i feel it deep inside
my soul, myriad of harsh tongue. this
fragile, devoted glass creature we
call Love. we mend our bodies
together again in the
meantime.
//
Writing, alongside art as a whole, has kind of been a big deal to me since I was young. My first attempt at poetry & writing must’ve been when I was at least four, creating stories for beloved imaginary characters of mine. Growing up, I was more of a reader than a writer—the Warrior Cats and Percy Jackson books will forever influence my writing, but I'm okay with that being a part of my life. It’s an iconic part of adolescence I find myself constantly reverting back to when I write.
Technically, I wasn’t originally born in Maryland, but it’s my forever home. I partially grew up in a backwater town in the South. I get most of my inspiration from that period of my life where I was traversing through figuring out why I always felt out of place with my orientation & identity while simultaneously struggling with finding myself in a comfortable position with religion. Focusing my pieces on sensitive portions of my life and my struggles with my own identity is a difficult task when going into that space of sitting down to actually write something after months of delirious studying and/or stagnant writer’s block, yet it can accomplish creating something I identify with—find a part of myself in. There’s something about writing that draws me into trying to create a piece I am both proud of and that I find myself placing my vulnerability into. So, in that sense, writing can be difficult, but continuous writing allows me to become a more productive writer and poet. The pieces here are a newer testament to my feelings, shower thoughts, and tidbits I’ve taken from real stories I’ve either gathered from others or told myself.
To me, being a writer is maintaining a sense of community you find amongst others whilst finding new ways to convey an emotion, a desire, a struggle, within words. It is both welcoming and terrifyingly challenging at the same time. In the context of my life now, as a tediously busy student, I continue to write. I continue to live and enjoy the moments I have with the others around me that I am immensely grateful for. Writing is a gift and an art. The growth you experience from it (writing fanfiction to working with other writers on pieces) is more important than you will ever realize!