NOVEMBER 2025 (POEMS): Jordan Byrum

"She lets the wind drift the tidings further and the water laps at my foam body." ("Sea Smoke, Dried Salt")

This November is a busy month for Artists from Maryland! After finishing up our high school creative writing contest with Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, we have decided on three winners and one runner up! We are featuring the second winner, Jordan Byrum! Below is her winning packet, and you can read our interview with her here!

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.

Caroline

Blazing heat had suffocated her youth.
With embers licking at her hairline, a mess of matted entanglements,
She had been a beauty queen, shimmers reflected against stained glass.
Rubies had adorned her throat, warning and premonition and sarcastically sacrificial.

With embers licking at her hairline, a mess of matted entanglements
She was feral, ferocious, and knew she was doomed without a care.
Rubies had adorned her throat, warning and premonition and sarcastically sacrificial,
When she was drenched in white-hot flickers and flames on stage.

She was feral, ferocious, and knew she was doomed without a care,
Treading to her demise as Sin in red-bottomed heels
When she was drenched in white-hot flickers and flames on stage.
Too young to be idolized, a spitfire, perhaps she hadn’t known of it.

Treading to her demise in red-bottomed heels,
She had been a beauty queen, shimmers reflected against stained glass.
Too young to be idolized, a spitfire, perhaps she hadn’t known
Blazing heat had suffocated her youth.

//

Sea Smoke, Dried Salt

and the sea breeze combs through my hair like the stolen moments from when I was six, my mother vigorously tearing into my hair with a crystal comb. Sea Mother, Lady Venus, a claim to which I am lost and drift against the tidings of warm, sea-kissed July. She slips through my fingers and I sway again. She lets the wind drift the tidings further and the water laps at my foam body. You bring me home into a bed of salt water and I fall back into feathered hands: ivory-white and nothing if only downy.

//