Home | Cindy Gulley

I write from the places most people avoid—

the restless thoughts, the soft hurts,

the unexpected beauty hiding under the mess.
Subtext is where I put the things that keep me up at night,
make me laugh at the wrong moment, or teach me to breathe again.

Where the unspoken
becomes undeniable.

A place where we whisper
loud and refuse to behave.

I didn’t grow up thinking I’d be a poet. Honestly, I spent most of my life trying very hard not to be one.

I’ve always written. I even switched my major to English because it felt like the most practical choice — not because of the job outlook, but because writing is the only place where beginnings, middles, and ends learn how to hold each other up. That made sense to me. Still does. Everyone else called it impractical, which I found hilarious, because I used that exact logic to talk my way into every job I ever had. I tried other roles for years —

IN CASE YOU'RE NEW HERE

I write poems and essays about the mind, the mess, the beauty, and the quiet rebellions beneath everyday life. Subtext is where I let the truth come up for air.

On Declaring Myself a Poet

It feels ridiculous declaring myself a poet. I’m living in a constant state of audition and submission — half in a world of observation and self-talk, half in a delusional reality where this somehow works out. The days of having a title are over. I’ve got nothing to offer at a dinner party except, “Metronome, my three-part poem about desire exhaling between my thighs, has been rejected.” But I don’t offer that up. I just say I’m still teaching yoga and trying to get published

Practice Notes

On Being an Unpublished Poet

I am a poet This is something I always knew about myself, but infrequently said out loud. I thought someone else had to grant me the title— an editor, a book deal, a stranger with authority, some imagined jury of literary adults who would someday tap me on the shoulder and deem me legitimate. For years, I kept writing in private like it was something I needed to hide or something I hadn’t earned yet. I treated poems like secrets instead of evidence. But lately, something shif

Practice Notes

I Can’t Pick Up the Wind, But I Keep Trying

I can’t pick up the wind, but I keep trying. It’s absurd, I know. But that’s how I move through the world— reaching for things I can’t hold, things that refuse shape, things that slip through my fingers no matter how tightly I close them. There’s a part of me that still believes if I could just catch the wind for a second— in my hands, in my chest, in a poem— I’d finally understand something I’ve been circling my whole life. Maybe that’s the problem. Or maybe that’s the whole

Fragments

Where the unspoken becomes undeniable. A place where we whisper loud and refuse to behave.

IN CASE YOU'RE NEW HERE

On Declaring Myself a Poet

On Being an Unpublished Poet

I Can’t Pick Up the Wind, But I Keep Trying

Where the unspoken
becomes undeniable.

A place where we whisper
loud and refuse to behave.