My friend Carrie gave me a delightfully curated bag of miscellany for Christmas this year. Along with a tube of chapstick, a box of tea, an iron-on patch of the crest of my favorite Premier League team (go Seagulls), and an old-timey bicycle horn, was a small black Moleskin notebook.
In the middle of January, I was working from home one day and struggling to focus/not take a nap. I pulled the notebook out, grabbed my best pencil, and figured it would be a good size to write a little poem in. Maybe even every work day. Could be a nice little thing, a nice little routine in the post-lunch lull when I’m tempted to sift through YouTube instead of shifting into the next task. What if I took a better sort of break? One that meant a brief moment of output amidst the hours of music and podcasts my brain swims around in during a tedious day? Plus I’ve never maintained any sort of consistent writing practice and might’n’t that be nice?
I still haven’t really—since beginning in mid-January I’ve taken a wee poem break 35 times. Not quite every day, but I’m pleased with it all the same. On the bottom of the first page I wrote, “vol. 1 – 2026.” So, high ambitions.
It’s a small notebook which means the pages themselves are small which means they’re easy to fill. Each line has to be short, each poem only needs to be short—I’ve intentionally kept them all to only one page. Sometimes there’s a unifying theme, sometimes it’s just a scatter plot of observations.
I don’t know enough about poetry to even confidently say they’re technically poems. But I format them like poems and I think enough about each word to try to make sure they’d sound good if read aloud.
They’re mostly about work and how I’m feeling about it or myself that day, or other outstanding concerns:
I’m sorry—
I don’t know anything about
The quality of the
Selected orchestral pieces
Or the reasonableness of the budget
I didn’t pack an afternoon snack
So I’ve crashed from chocolate
And not gotten
Nearly enough done.
But I’ll log off and leave
In the delusion that
Monday, I’ll be brimming
With focus and vim. (March 27)
Or this excerpt from the week my catalytic converter got stolen:
Making calls to my mom
and my insurance
In the coffee kitchen
By the box of microwave popcorn
That the Grants office wants to share (March 31)
I have the most fun messing around with words, secure in the freedom of not needing to be intelligible to anyone else. My flowers that “Have yet to/Be-stink” (Feb 6) and my “need to ensharp this ‘ere pencil” (April 27). Describing a basketball ref as “a judge/ In black shoes/And never enough belt” (March 19), or this pure expression of meaningless sounds during a particularly dudge-ful afternoon:
I get so biffy
I got so squiffy
I heaved and I ho’ed
And I gave my tuppence
There’s docs in the queue
I’m alone in the corner
Ate leaves at lunch
And got told
To go see the snow
Me bum’s gone numb
My sniffer’s gone red
There’s grease in my hair
And tools in my shed (March 2)
Don’t have a shed, don’t think “biffy” or “squiffy” are words. But it felt good to get out.
They’re not meant for critique, they’re not meant to go anywhere or mean anything to anyone but me. This little collection will, I suppose, be a nice record of this season of my life when I flip through it down the line. But its primary purpose is really just the act of doing it. Like taking a quick walk to the coffee kitchen to make sure I don’t sit at my desk all day—it’s a break and a stretch for my brain. I physically turn my chair away from my computer towards a different part of my desk, take a quick think and feel, and use a pencil to puzzle out those thoughts and/or feelings onto a piece of paper. And that activity feels good for my brain. (And the YouTube videos that I watch about reducing screentime agree.)
Here’s hoping that each afternoon, I’ll be brimming with slightly more “focus and vim.”
Christina Ribbens (’19) studied history, studio art, and data science at Calvin and public humanities at Georgetown. She now lives in the part of Virginia that’s almost Washington, DC where she helps award grants to arts nonprofits. She takes a lot of walks to admire the landscaping in peoples’ front yards, mostly listens to British comedians’ podcasts, and likes to make friends via sports.
