Poetry
I first started writing poetry during the pandemic lockdown as a way to process and explore my emotions. Since then poetry has become my most freeing and authentic form of personal expression. Below is a collection of my poems dating over the past four years.
Winner of Mimesis Language Arts Award 2023 (Saddle River, NJ)
A Painting of August’s Last Hours
By Daisy J. Martinez
Maybe I am
A painting of August's last hours
Maybe I am, but the sunset is discolored
Watercolor skies
Maybe the flakey colors of purple should be lost in the
Bare, Cast-away
Color of orange
Nostalgia a nasty thing
That
Creeps up to you
Without permission.
Tastes like hard candy
On a summer night.
Last night I thought about it the same way,
Like it was not a memory but a love letter.
"A Painting of August's Last Hours"
This poem is about the final fleeting moments of summer, and the sorrow and beauty in the passage of time.
Winner of Scholastic Art & Writing Awards 2025 - Honorable Mention
Hidden Religions
By Daisy J. Martinez
Beautiful, Beautiful Bombs
Skeletons of fireworks
all handprints
made of
thin red spindles that
fade.
Brittle and white,
frail.
It eases me that they splinter.
they are bones of
something beautiful,
burning to a violent end.
Sparkling,
like pins of light
poked through the sky.
They are holes of heaven,
a desperate deliverance
for a God to believe in.
I ripped him out the womb
of an idle night.
Burning from the inside
and out to the open,
these bombs will be bombs
but tonight they are God.
"Hidden Religions" Part 1
"Hidden Religions" is a two-part poem exploring my experience with religious fixation and how I search for religious meaning and personal faith in mundane, everyday life. These realizations can be complex, contradictory, and painful. The first part titled “Beautiful, Beautiful Bombs” is inspired by red fireworks I saw. I found a complicated religious meaning in them when no one else did. I related their finite nature to the finite reality of life and interpreted them as a sign from a higher power.
Winner of Scholastic Art & Writing Awards 2025 - Honorable Mention
Hidden Religions
By Daisy J. Martinez
Sigils of a Night Out
City lights,
neon and
breathless,
echo my words like
a howling
tombstone.
The tall glass,
unfit for my hand,
drains like an oracle.
I want.
I want.
I speak in wants
so much the word
doesn’t make sense to me.
I find a riddle
in the residue of a bottle.
The mirror is
a psalm in the night.
I look to street signs
as if they want to know me.
I speak of religion
I don’t understand.
"Hidden Religions" Part 2
"Sigils of a Night Out" is inspired by the blur of a social party, and how I often connect objects to religious messages, clues, and ideals that I feel these objects seem to tell me.
Awaken to Commandments
by Daisy J. Martinez
“And now is the time to
obey the blade”
he said unto me.
pointing a silver digit to battle,
he whispered to
rage
rage
rage
“and all the wonders you will carry in a blade”
to rake the ground
in which we made
to massacre it,
love its pieces,
to worship and rebuild it,
you came only to yield
not peace but a sword
"Awaken to Commandments"
Divine Encounter
By Daisy J. Martinez
ordinary,
was the night
indefinite
in its silken thrill
an obstruction
to the moonlight
watching its shadow
waver on the wall
curious for contact
streaked across my room
my faith in
actualization
I drew in a breath
a shallow
question of resistance
only
to mumble devotions
mouth agape
like a believer
"Divine Encounter"
Explicit
by Daisy J. Martinez
love,
how you haunt me
you follow me into my
lamp lit crypt
you speak like a devil
who knows
the slumbers I seek
are only full of
figments of you
the devil I know
is only my proclivity
for libido
insomnia, my conscience
invoking
I will stay awake
While loving you
"Explicit"
Uranometria
By Daisy J. Martinez
We measure the heavens
obsessed in the pursuit of sky
pawing at freedom as a
key for release
the matte finish of our world
is a dabbed into detail
we live in his fingerprints
left to dry
"Uranometria"
Soothsayer of Deserted Lands
By Daisy J. Martinez
in the highway
blades of shadows
cast from the mountains
strung upon the ground like a graveyard
the velvet night
pooled beneath my feet
bleeding into the road
an ocean
waited to be parted
a messiah to follow
to fulfill and
wade within
its bed of eclipse,
to wake within
its damp moonlight and
hollow air
still dry and warm
from yesterday’s fervor
it is the heat of a desert
a humid
metropolis abandoned
bounded by its memories
and
burdened by its life
I combed through its waves
and found heaven in its headlights