The Reynolds Young Writers Workshop at Denison University - Anthology 2024

Crossing the Ditc

June 22-29, 2024

Denison University

The Jonathan R. Reynolds Young Writers Workshop

Alex Albert Smile

“You can be a leader too, don’t ever forget that.” The woman with black hair and black eyes remembered those words well. She had repeated those words to herself ever since she heard them from someone who she once hated while he held that stupid smile on his bloodied face. That day was almost a moment of rebirth for her where all the feelings of doubt and inadequacy were washed away as she stood beneath him as he protected her from an attack. How many times had he saved her? Thirty times? Over one hundred? She couldn’t seem to remember. What she could remember was his bright and carefree smile that he’d always flash after always saying something she thought was stupid or when he described his ideal future of a world not bogged down by the cards that fate would deal us with a twisted grin. She never understood that smile and now she never would. She closed her eyes for a moment as she sat beneath cherry blossom trees that swayed from side to side. The small pastel pink petals falling all around her Staring at the dark abyss of her eyelids she began to retrace what his smile looked like. The carefree smile she had gotten so used to seeing.

She tried and tried and tried but every time she’d try she could only remember the final smile she received from him before he disappeared. The final smile she saw from him was nothing like the smile she’d grown accustomed to seeing. The final smile had a hint of sadness within it. It gave her promises of a better future after this storm where good and evil clashed. However, with that smile of promise came the consequences.

The future where people can be free from fate had no place for a boy who could control it.

That final smile was cruel and unfair. Forcing a promise onto her that she didn’t want and now she was paying the price for it. She wished that she could see that carefree smile that guaranteed a happy ending with her, him and everyone she cared for in it. However, that wasn’t reality

As she slowly opened her eyes tears streamed down her face as she looked down to find a headstone with the words “Kuu Jericho” written on it. She looked at it at first with quivering lips, and then remembered the smile he always gave her when she needed it.

Slowly but surely, she steadied her lips, stretched her cheeks, curled her lips, bore her pearly white teeth, and gave Kuu a smile.

Zander Baker stepladder exe (zeplar )

At my cubicle, I hastily wrote an encrypted report on the meeting. I cursed myself for not having some sort of paper to take notes during the affair, but it being called so suddenly didn’t give me the chance. I assumed The Help was doing the same thing now, but I didn’t get the chance to speak with him.

I was actually writing two reports, one I was supposed to be doing, and this encrypted one. Whenever anyone passed by, I pulled the real one over and pretended to be proofreading it. Everyone’s loud footsteps on the marble floor was all too obvious. There was one person, however, who would always manage to sneak up on me.

“Hey, Malcolm,” Livia said sternly.

My head snapped up. She was leaning over the wall of the cubicle. As usual, she managed to get there without making a peep, let alone me seeing her walk over

“Hey,” I replied as nonchalantly as possible. She was still visibly angry, even as she failed to cover it up with a grin. “Need something?”

“Let’s get lunch.”

“Now?”

“Yeah. You’re not hungry?” Admittedly, my stomach was painfully empty. The meeting had cut through my entire lunch break. Still, I wanted to secure my report as soon as possible.

“Sure I am, but I’m somewhat busy right now.” At that, her eye started twitching and her grin warped into a threatening smile..

“I already had your work called off. You wouldn’t let that effort go to waste would you?”

I only half believed her, but I considered this a curse and a blessing if anything. Though, it seemed short sighted on her part. “You did that without conferring with me before? At the very least?”

I was getting close to her last straws. “I’m your boss. Let’s go.” There was a rare fire in her eyes. I knew she wouldn’t let up until I agreed.

“Only in technicality,” I said under my breath. If she did hear me, she didn’t react. Relenting, I buried both reports in a file cabinet, locked it, and stood up. Her old smile returned and her eyes lit up. “What’re you waiting for?”

Riley Brown

Sociologie à les Veines

My veins ache for you

The rouge et blue are turning purple as they twist

Blood pumps from ma cœur to my fingers

Through the rings on my knuckles but it Will not move easily

Maroon clots batter my arteries but I haven’t eaten

A thing in months, so it must be the richness of you

Toi,

Whose smile is skin-thick cream avec red, red cherries

Whose hands remind me of the last supper

Le baignoire fills with water as my nails secrete sheets and sheets of oil

My brain murmurs the same phrase over and over and over and c’est “My insides keep me living for the chance of us”

Are your ears melting yet my darling?

Has the hair burned off your tête?

Are the whites of your eyes slowly growing ulcers?

You are so lovely though. Très aimes

I sit in the tub filled with mes cœurs but they are dry, I had the hindsight to put all of my blood in my purse So as not to stain my legs.

Susannah Caroll

Why Do We Say That We “Fall” Asleep?

Why do we say that we “fall” asleep?

Why that verb? That connotation?

Do we trip or stumble over our own two feet to get into a fantasy land of dreams?

Or is it that we plummet toward our own thoughts

So fast

There is no other way of describing it?

Some nights, as my tired body hugs its frame after a day of unapologetic suering

This bed like a sugar craving

The very idea of sleep seeming so deliciously sweet

My eyes lie open like a scared pre-op patient

The anesthesia too scared to let itself into my too stubborn veins

I question and answer

Dig up the old fossils and bones in my mind as if I would unearth

A lonely corner that would reveal something new

The dust sweeping away into a polished looking glass of conviction

When we all fall asleep

Where do we go?

Is this what death feels like?

Mom, please tell me

Will you or I ever know?

Or perhaps I should ask my grandfathers

If one would rise from their grave

Their urn

Tell me and convince me of the fears I don’t want

Hug my phobia and nurture my curiosity

In my years of unlived life

I’ve heard the rumor like a whisper in my mind

Never seeming quite real

That dreams are to happen every night

Perhaps it’s so high school to disbelieve the cheerleaders and scientists

Dreams, only occasionally remembered

Leave so much to uncertainty

My body, my choice

They are not real

Those images of rainbows or murderers

Only exist by the mere creation of our beings

And I do not believe in my own stardust formation

The embers of my mind are too far gone to create a re now

Perhaps my true question is

The one that causes the black plague to come back for more

If I do not recall my dreams

Did they ever really happen?

If it takes me pain and brutality to drift into a seizure-like rapid eye movement but the memories of each night have been concealed

Should I be afraid?

Should I relish those bruises I am so unsure of?

Because I am never in the present

Under the tree

But rather near the carpet that soaks up the water and ornament glass that falls

The shards pierce my throat

My eyes have been blinded

My ears are no longer accustomed to These thoughts that plague my oor mat brain as I wonder Why do we say that we “fall” asleep?

Owen Carso A Thousand Years in the Grove of the Patriarchs

Our western journey was reaching a close. Mount Rainier National Park’s Paradise Inn had housed our family for a week, but our departure was fast approaching. Our final hike would be a legendary one, through the Grove of the Patriarchs, on a trail that would transport us centuries into the distant past. The Grove of the Patriarchs is renowned for its age-old trees that have survived for centuries, unharmed by the mighty forces of nature. As our feet struck the beginning of the trail, feelings of awe washed over us as we struggled to contemplate the lifespans of the immense trees ahead.

The Grove of the Patriarchs is on an island in the Ohanapecosh River. Crossing the shallow water on a narrow suspension bridge, we came upon gnarled red cedars, slender Douglas firs, and cone-shaped western hemlocks towering over us, their drooping branches casting shadows over the placid trail beneath them. We arrived at a western red cedar whose age surpassed a thousand years. Its vast, twisted trunk seemed to express the wisdom of generations long-gone.

Rays of sunlight penetrated the canopy of leaves, guiding us down the trail. A light wind chilled us and gently rustled the ancient trees, which seemed to breathe with each gust of wind, reminding us that despite their age, they were still alive. Lush vegetation and clusters of mushrooms bordered the trail. We encountered a collapsed tree covered in moss, with new plants

sprouting from its decaying trunk. A grove whose trees had survived for centuries faced death nonetheless, but its fallen trees helped give life to future behemoths.

We came to realize that the time we spent in the presence of these breathtaking giants was but a second in their long lives. These gargantuan organisms had witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations. Since the birth of these trees, millions of humans have lived and died. These living monuments in the forest were already standing when Incan engineers constructed Machu Picchu in the fifteenth century, when French stonemasons completed Notre Dame Cathedral in the fourteenth century, and even when the Ancestral Puebloans built cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in the twelfth century. To think these trees came first fills us with awe. Human lives are measured in days, weeks, and years, not centuries. So much occurs within a single human lifetime, but imagine the events that occur within the lifespan of an enormous, long-lived red cedar

The Grove of the Patriarchs enlightened us. Despite its elephantine trees that have withstood centuries, the forest continues to change. New trees sprout from the trunks of their fallen companions, and birds and critters change the environment to suit their needs. Earth is ever-changing; fires and floods change the landscape, but so too do erosion and decay. The Grove of the Patriarchs filled us with wonder as we imagined the generations that have come and gone while the big trees have silently reached for the sky

Lily Chesgreen

I don’t expect the light to return

any time soon.

The colors of each note blur together –my mother ’s fingers creating a painting with each press of the keys. I have been told I am the only one, besides my mother, who can see the artwork. The paint flecks a canvas in which my thoughts have taken residence, dripping down without caution for staining the carpet. My mother has never minded the patterns the flecks weave – constellations threaded on a single string.

I refuse to walk down the stairs. My feet would not carry me if I wanted them to. I stumble. Blurred edges flood the frame. Why would there need to be a canvas if the art was lost long ago?

I finally realize why astronomers see hope in the sky at night. As I fall, my vision fades – vacant of naturality, or maybe the natural world in its purest form. Who can tell? Knees hit wood. Bruises last longer than one thinks. I am not so used to opening the curtains but I draw the string – light, or what they tend to call light these days.

The instrument thoughtlessly responded when my mother ’s fingers glided over the keys, yet the melody seemed to have a mind of its own. Hurried hands bring bright blue pinpoints that scatter across my vision as her nails tap each key. The light, as they call it, was the only thing that allowed her to play. Synthetic versions were unavailable to nearly everyone these days.

The tune echoed through the halls. I clutched my hands to my chest, a blanket draped around my arms,

relishing every moment but not able to live through seeing my mother ’s form, shoulders curved inwards, hands like taught string clinging to bone, eyes tethered to the keys.

I remember when her delicate hands would guide my own over those very keys, softly conducting a masterpiece. That was when we still had the light. That was when each note, each color it held, was promised to be followed with another –another song, another canvas, another splatter of paint on the carpet. Her hands don’t hold that promise anymore. They can’t. No one’s can.

Anyways, she has been at this for days now.

I don’t expect the light to return any time soon.

Cedar Connell Ruby Holler

I ask questions a lot. Not to learn anything; I am not an innately curious person. I also do not care much for “chatting”. I certainly am not one of those compulsively talkative people—the kind that show up to some social gathering or other and always seem to saturate conversations with their inane inner monologues, weighing everyone down under the still, pallid waters of their entire subconscious. In actuality, I do not care very much for people. As my second grade teacher Ms. Everly remarked to my parents, “Ruby is fiercely her own—by her own and on her own entirely” (this, I later learned, was followed by a stern reproach to the tune of “young ladies of civility ought to know better than to incite brawls in the schoolyard, and your daughter is no exception”). The truth is, I ask questions because I want to fill the silence. I don’t like the sound of silence. Father says it is because I was raised on the nursery rhymes of screaming sirens and the electric hum of the sleepless city wafting up and through my bedroom window. That I always appreciated the fact that I was but one of 8.33 million listening to that clamoring bliss, one ear pressed against the beating pulse of the infinite. I suppose there was something comforting in that capacity of immensity, something bordering on an insouciant existentialism—I realize now it was a desolation I cherished. Used to cherish. Now things are different. Now, listening to the apple trees rustling insidiously in the night breeze, I know I live in a new kind of desolation, one that is complete.

I remember the silence after Mother fell ill. It was like a crashing wave had drenched my world in a melancholy blue and ebbed away with all of Mother ’s energy, taking our joy with it. I saw it in her smile first. The once elastic lips of hers so quick to stretch into a smile began to stiffen, and her bright green eyes shone less and less with that emerald spark. I remember one night lying on her chest listening to the chorus of our heartbeats with the monitor our metronome

set to 54 beats per minute. I lay like that for hours, listening to the pounding rhythm of life. It was like I was back in my room—only now my ear was pressed unto the rise and fall of the world that built me. But the tides must always rise, and soon the crashing wave came back and took Mother, my world, too.

Father and I got on as best we could. But sushi nights at the kitchen table felt vacant like the now empty echo of “I’m home” after school or the inside of the fridge because Father “hadn’t the time to go to the store because he was so busy getting our affairs in order and no that didn’t mean that Ruby could get a pet rabbit and would she please stop asking him to tell her bedtime stories about her mother because it was too painful.”

Somewhere along the way I began tiptoeing around the apartment as if I was afraid—afraid of awakening some sinister thing hiding between the memories eddying in each room like a roiling swirl of something dark and black and stifling. The apartment felt brittle then; one loud step would shatter the whole illusion that everything was fine. So we moved.

Now we are here, in Sallisaw, South Dakota. 17 Cherry Lane, Sallisaw, South Dakota. Sallisaw, South Dakota has three things: soybeans (the main export), corn (the second main export), and Aunt Rosie and Uncle Lyle’s farm. I had only been to the farm—or as Father calls it, “That Country Bumpkin Place”—once when I was very little. Still, even though Aunt Rosie and Uncle Lyle weren’t really our aunt and uncle, they were those tacitly recognized people whom you wrote down on official-looking documents that asked you to please state “Trusted

Guardian(s) Not in Household.” So now I am here, in a stale bedroom on the second floor of the old farmhouse listening to the rustling of the apple tree outside my window and the occasional “tap, tap, tap” of its brown arm on the window pane. And I listen still, straining against the deafening silence while the tensile night stretches into oblivion.

Indigo Darrow-Meadows

Blue

I am asked to publish my being–

Gather the remains of my childhood synesthesia, And let it consume me into a poem

My being is not wild, my being is not free I am the morning dewdrops that coat the grass

I am blue

Blue; the nickname given by my grandmother at my infancy

Blue; the color of the urn that now holds her tender ashes

I could see myself in any body of waterSo much depth, so much fluctuation

Yet I run like a deer–

I am illuminated by the headlights on my own car I curl around each tree and each passing town, Becoming visible only for a moment

As if to test that I am real

You may hear me in echoes of thunder, Faint rumbling in the distance–

I am loud, but I am distant

I can be soft, lovely;

I can be a polished stone resting against the edge of the beach, Or I can be the feeling of a bare foot wincing as it steps upon it

Do not lie and call me perfect; I am not perfect. I am an analog clock set three minutes behind Set to make me three minutes late to friendship, Three minutes late to love, To lust, to loss I fall into traps of exclusion I lose the sense within my veins–

This is the warning that the minute hand leaves behind

I am seen in the crevices of the lowest valley— I am whispered on the lips of a lonely poet

I am the killer, I am the lover

I am plastered on every wall, drawn on every cover

Each part of my beauty is planted in the roots of every tree I am everywhere, but you can not see me

Again, I am blue, always blue

Always the one who turns sorrow into alleviation

Always the one who lives on the horizon of overcast weather

Always the one who coats the morning dew drops with my tears

A cycle, A blue, lonely cycle

AnneMarie Emery Dust in Time

I try to keep my eyes open all the time, trying to keep him in line. It gets harder with each cast of the dust in the dusk that the west breathes out. I slowly passed by on the horse. A horse who was never mine to begin, yet the beige beast proved loyalty. We approach a small town in the distance that becomes clearer to see. The faint lights in the town are as bright as the sun, saying they don’t sleep. Well, me neither, I didn’t come here to sleep. Entering the town down the dusty road, where lights were held, as the night got cooler a saloon spotted. One should never expect better Though I’d reckon that is where I can find someone called, “Buck '', he has no last name and I am sure that's not his real name either For the night to arrive, the place is packed with people from outside smoking, inhaling, exhaling. Getting off of the beige horse, I stepped towards the saloon, seeing the sign with crooked letters, “Rusted Nails”. This is right up his alley, he has to be here. The sounds of laughter and music get louder with each second, as I move past people and enter the swinging cracked wooden doors. An overbearing smell of booze and smoke filled my nose, as I scope the place. The strong scent consumes my clothes that won’t wash away Ol’ Buck, Ol’ Buck, where would you be in this outlaw town? As the town had my fate under its dusty valley of orange. Hues of yellow gas lights become brighter and flickered to where he may be. Finding him I could see his coaxed grin which correlated to nothing good, watching his every move like an anxious child. Of course he would be gamblin, watching his movement become so sly. He robbed the biggest bank in DeadWood, yet he is here, gambin’ away his gold. Shiny yellow gold's you could not even imagine to handle bare in your calloused

hands. Anyone who knows risk vs reward, they always find the risk before you can even blink your eyes.

Our glances conjoined as if he knew he was my project, we became wires woven in a fence. Before I could get to him, BANG! My ears were ringing before I could manage my gun. Feeling the bitter sting intertwined with me, part of me, taking me down onto the wooden floor. The bullet sank deep into my chest, making itself homely into a fleshy body just to feast. I meet one of the ends in DeadWood, the life so good as my own slipping insteading of sticking. Maybe next time I won’t go against an outlaw named Buck or perhaps even at all.

Allison English Dance of the Marionees

Woven from our angel hair veins, the noose around my neck grows tighter and I plead that it is simply my delusion. My hopeful prayers swarm around the notion like buzzing wasps in the heat of a vivid July, though they refrain from hovering for too long. Our still-smoldering grievances bound into threads for a swinging pendulum, fraying away at every twist of the rope.

It rocks hesitantly, side to side, back and forth, eyes moving in sync with its teeters. It’s incessant sway lulls me, not as the midnight comfort from a mother, but akin to the sweet calamity of ignorance.

The nape once kissed by Apollo, held steady with such force as the stoic owla creature lucky to have its hoots and coos to define itnow peeling away with blisters from the synchronous pacing of the pendant.

And once my pain is suited for their tyrannous standards, once my agony has seeped into the soil, sprouting dutiful hymns that come from alien lips, they will continue in their torment, prying the tattered, once-beating fibers from my body and weaving them through the souls of the many to form the unsteady tightrope on which we will perform.

Our act will not be comical; We are only apprentices in this performance of depravity. We balance only on the hollow bodies beneath us, playing along with the puppeteer, our limbs in perfect harmony with his fingertips in the audience.

We are his mute marionettes; our porcelain cheeks set in a blushed state, painted with the soft murmurs of “be quiet” and a pinch of “just smile.”

My ceramic eyes, glazed with his favorite: “good for nothing blue,” always seem to blur my vision.

The crash of the waves in the crowd is the only thing I can make out, each one devouring the other in a sea of audacity The waves grow larger with each step, Flourishing in our hardships.

My view is still awfully murky, and, coupled with the distance from the steady floor, it’s hard to truly tell, but somehow, I can faintly see his lips moving among the whitecaps in a crooked waltz of power: The show must go on

My Shadows Compartment

There's she goes again, the wheels on her reckless cart falling off, crumbling into a pathetic show of her efforts. Always failing when it's least expected, yet of course when it brews the largest inconvenience.

The packages inside tumble astray, bound to break open, to shatter on the tar-like floor sticky with her vices. It won't be so easy to clean up this time.

When they do spill, which will be at a moment of utmost importance, I will break along with them. Floating down the self-made river of acid, toxic thoughts seeping into my pretty blue blouse stitched with the threads of my ignorance.

I’ve heard the waters warm, Though maybe the frigid cold would do me better; wake me up from this futile attempt for something larger.

Anna Farrar Pluck

The sun is furious, and the blossoms outside the boy’s window stink of slaughter. He crawls from his bed, sallow and weak, and finds his guitar He pauses in the light-soft hall, clutching it to his chest, and his breath begins to quicken, his eyes begin to burn. He gives himself a moment, a stretch of grief, before he passes through the door The air is heavy with heat, oppressive with it. Dilapidated mobile homes line the dusty street. The boy settles on the front step, guitar nestled on his knee, and he plays for the dandelions. They’d sprung from a pathetic patch of grass the morning before the world fell to its knees, and had held on in the weeks following. He admired their commitment to living, and since the first time he’d emerged with his guitar he’d played to them. Played for them. His hands ghost across the strings he knows so well, the music curls in on itself and expands, a melody the boy has known since childhood. It is the only sound in the world, and finally, he can smile. His audience sways quietly in the grass, and it relieves him. The humiliation of school talent shows and music classes– it'll never happen again. The music grows stronger. The song shifts, and shifts and shifts until it’s no longer a song, simply a crooked mess of chords. The dandelions don’t mind, they’re still swaying. The sun doesn’t mind either, its brutality neither softens nor worsens. Relief is a sick rush, and the boy bows his head under the weight of it, fingers still plucking. I’m glad that I’m alone, he thinks, and he pauses. Waits for a reckoning–but the reckoning has already passed. All that is left now are dandelions and guitars and boys that want to write music as they die. Boys that are grateful to be alone, grateful that they are the only ones left. The dandelions are grateful, too– for the music.

Charloe Fassnacht

Pure

Kindling warmth and tight embraces. The perfect undertaker, burying hurt and anger and sorrow in a sweet gaze, in a soft tuck of hair behind the ear Glory can lead to shame in an instant. Both burn, both set the stomach aflame with roaring emotion and surges of power This body doesn’t quite fit anymore, its simple mortality too large and noisy for the quiet whisper it wishes to become. A familiar shame rises across my frame and traps itself within the borders of my skin, like a herd of sheep that can’t escape the fence. It is not public, it is not open. It is quiet. It is red. It is gentle, it is swooning, it is loving. This private affair sings softly in the muddled darkness of a four-walled enclosure. It is a spark that aches to be stomped out. Two can know it, few can show it, next to none can say it.

Marguerite Flaig The Anniversary

Loud words and angry voices echoed and bounced to the atmosphere’s perimeter. Camping is a bad thought; confined tent life never improves family matters. Even the trees look sorry for us, drooping and leaning their boughs away The moon is misty

I should have told them, my captors, that the lonesome wilderness would not cure our problems, but worsen them. Not that my mother would have listened to me anyways.

I feel foolish for not putting my foot down a long time ago.

Why didn’t I speak? I know; I was afraid. Instead, I retreated, weeping in solitude, never speaking, not smiling, and barely breathing. I carefully lived with welts on my wrists. I’ll be reminded of that day many times, each year and every year of my life. I often wonder how I will escape that day, if I will ever be able to overcome my own guilt and sorrow

The anniversary of my undoing.

My poor children. One day when I have kin of my own, my mother affirms, I will understand why she acted as she did. But the reasons for her choices are motive enough for me to spend my life barren, an empty clam that once held a pearl.

It’s funny how time continues, repetitive thing it is. Our way of keeping track and dreading a day on the calendar hurts even the stoic. Even if you try to dismiss it from your mind and lock it away in the safety of your consciousness, memory never fails to recall the things you wish would dissolve. And despite your protests, instinctive reflexes to recoil and withdraw into the dark shamefully begin again.

It was that unfortunate night that my memory never ceases to recall with great detail and vividness, like re-living it each time over. A newsreel of our family’s foundation crumbling and me, the sole suspect, witness, and prisoner. The day replays and replays, plaguing my mind and burrowing deeper into my soul, until it is branded upon my beating heart. My heart will shake and tremble, like a wire whisk, springy from nervousness and ricocheting in search of what went wrong.

A derailed watch frantically trying to keep pace with the memory and calendar and regret and trees and moon and camping and LOUD.

I just want to turn it off.

And one day I will collapse because the heart was too sinful and the family too maimed. And the day I do collapse, I will collapse alone because of my own inability to absolve the past.

Happy Anniversary.

Wondering for Now

It was dark, quiet, but loud. The light was on, and it cast A path down the silent road.

A car began, startling into the present. Her head leaned against the window, Peering out she observed The shifting frame of her life. Trees passed by in her vision, Then quickly and abruptly uprooted from her sight.

Her brow furrowed as she traveled, A new path unbeknownst to her

It was dark, quiet, but loud. The lights were on, Illuminating the entire sky. The cars always starting and stopping, Then whooshing away, Their direction, yet to be discovered. The buildings brushing the sky, Reaching higher, into the galaxies. Hopeful, yearning, nostalgic. So much. All at once. Home?

Sebi Gambo Sansebilat

In Arabic, the name Sansebilat represented a fountain. Once a person drinks it after their death, they gain the passageway to paradise. As a result one crosses the threshold, entering a world of eternal happiness, that allows for love and peace to co-exist without the monstrosities of pain.

The name represented a diversification, and this lay in the young girl, who bore the name. The girl created it, through the experiences that led to her becoming. From the hardships of Nigeria to the luxuries of America, she was unlike any other. But it was not the experiences alone that defined the name, no for there were many immigrants before and after her, but it was what she made of it.

Her motive stood in the hands of dreams. She dreamt and dreamt of something better than what currently was and she strove to bring it to life. Despite such dreams, there laid the realities of tears, hard work, doubts, failures and worries, but she dreamt anyway for it was the only escape she knew.

She loved many things and wanted to learn everything, hence why she dreamt of more.

She found beauty in arts, so she embarked on a journey to become the best artist she could be, drawing portraits of the beauties before her

She found beauty in stories, so she embarked on a journey to become the best writer she could be, writing stories that drew a person’s mind away from the concerns before them.

She found beauty in food, so she embarked on a journey to create something that not only filled a person with satisfying pleasure but became aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

But the most important of them all, was the beauty she found in the eyes of invention. This field held multiple directions, but she embarked on a journey to create as much as she could before drawing in her last breath. She dreamt of creating a modern technology powerful enough to save lives, help students, and people as they too lived their day to day lives. This journey was not only bound to satisfy her curiosity but satisfy the lives of others as well.

But despite all of her talents, she dreamt of doing better, being better because at the end of the day, her truest desires of them all, lied not in the hands of satisfying her curiosity, but in the hands of improving the lives of those which she loved the most. This was her family’s. She never grew fulfilled because her truest desires were not granted until paradise alone lay in the hand of her family’s lives. It was then that she would know she had succeeded in her journey

The girl was the truest definition of a polymath in and out. She was not just one thing but multiple, and in the process she became a glory capable of impacting the world in every aspect. She became a leader capable of changing the world in the process.

Perhaps one could say that her division alone led to the world’s greatest changes and therefore the world’s personal paradise, as these technologies improved, decreasing some of the existing pains in it. She made the name’s purpose come to life, but in the process she made her ’s come to life as well. Sansebilat, no longer became a river in heaven but a division that gave one heaven in every shape and form. It is in this reason alone that she became the true bearer capable of holding this name, and as she leaves her legacy behind, her next generation is bound to add on to that division, adding more paradise onto this Earth in one form or another…

Nidhi Gandhi

you ask if i am here, and i wonder the same

i speak to god, any god,

mine, or yours, or perhaps a stranger who fancied himself the proprietor of fate, and i ask him, what good is it to be savored, feared, undefeated, revered?

what good is it, god,

(mine, or yours, or perhaps a stranger ’s)

to be synonymous with death? only the cacophony of silence greets me.

he judges me, so i will judge him. we do not get to judge ourselves for our own sins, after all.

these are words i know, mine, or yours, or perhaps a stranger ’s,

too comfortably to learn. and if i think too hard, if i ask why the leaves are leaf

green and the sky is sky blue, if i breathe too close to glass reality, all i will see is fog.

what good is it, grief, mine, or yours, or perhaps a stranger ’s

to be divine? what good is it, life, to be as bitter as red wine? does it reply? speak to me in a precious voice, a voice like the silk of the abandoned

heavens. a voice, mine, or yours, or perhaps a stranger ’s, forged in the core of dying stars. speak to me intimately, or do not speak to me at all. and - if you will - tell me, lover, what good is it to be human?

Bryan Garcia Earth Beyond the Horizon

The sip of a fancy drink can be heard from anywhere in the ballroom. The smell of champagne filled my nose with young wonder.

Everything was so big I didn’t even notice the absence of my parents. The talking of adults, of investments and wages, nothing that would make sense to me then, suddenly it dawns upon me. “Mom? Dad?” I look through a towering forest of legs to no avail. Running towards the exit. Pushing through the towering legs, “Scuse me” “Sorry” “Coming through” I said stumbling through.

The next thing I felt was the tightness on my wrist. I look to see my cousin. “Henrey?” I said, “Have you seen-” “Yes! Come with me!” as he led me across the endless hallway to a propped open door labeled “Guest room.”

The light coming from the room felt inviting. We heard mumbling from various voices inside the room as we approached. “Yes and, will we be able to see these places?” My mom said. I peered around the opening to who she was talking to and saw a man in a black suit with a tie decorated with space-themed pins. “If you sponsor this project, we’ll make sure you have first seats to the exploration expedition.”

“And Rick, you discovered the technology to make this possible?” My father would ask. “Yes! And as the director, If you. The Devin Institution. Were to sponsor this new field of otherworldly exploration. We’ll be able to discover sections of the universe you’ve never imagined.” The man in the black suit explained. “And, Rick, what do you call yourselves?”

“Outer Corps,” Rick said, nervous-like. “Well. Rick. Consider The Devins Institution an official

sponsor of outer corporations.” My father said, shaking hands with the director. We heard steps approaching the door so we fled.

And from the dream of the past, I awoke. Lying in a bed of greenery, leaves, and bush. A lush jungle with no wildlife to be found. But cubic geometric shapes fly past at bullet speed. Sitting up from my slumber, still regaining consciousness, rubbing my eyes. “What are those?” I said to myself. Waking myself up.. But the flying cubes would remain. “What the hell?” I said to myself multiple times.

Rising to my feet. Brushing the greenery off of my back. The buzzing of the flying shapes gets my ears to ring, I look up. I see not a blue sky, nore pink sunset, or even a dark starry night, but a grid. Thick white lines, with scattered islands and structures. “Where the hell am I?” I said aloud.

I feel a gush of wind, almost strong enough to knock me off of my feet. And in front of me appears a T shaped geometrical cube. I hear various frequencies and different sounds and static until it tunes into a human voice. “Get on, we have to go.” It would say. As unassumingly, I ask. “Why?” “I’ll explain on the way. A dangerous entity is entering this plane. We have to go.” It explained. “What are you?” I asked. “Listen human I’m trying to help only because us entities don’t see many of you around here.” “Ok. Fine.” I would let up. mounting onto the back of this geometrical being. As suddenly im surrounded with an orange coat of a plasma like fluid, sticking me to the back of the creature. “This is gonna be faster than you’ve ever moved through space, but you’ll be safe with me.”

Shayna Hayashi

Roing in this Room

My plants–are dying

What is there left without My longing hope I cling to strings

Pulling my puppet

But relief can’t seem to enter me–

I shake with this pressure Carving into me

As I sit on this street–the intersection of my life I take into consideration my spite

Self inflicting these wounds I have become bruised

When not even my mother ’s

Smiling face

Can return me to grace

You can assume fate has made her play

Her fingers twisted in a peculiar array

But please–allow me to pretend I know how this ends

Caroline Holloway Imrie The Bookmaking Habits of the Teenage Girl

The American teenager writes her books everywhere, on anything she can find. On scraps of gum wrappers with little messages scrawled

inside: I love you, call me, I’m ok. In the margins of her history notes: half played games of tic-tac-toe, inside jokes meant for eyes that never saw them, doodles of meaningless repeating lines (they mean something to the author). In her phone’s camera roll: every pretty cloud she thought was worth keeping, all the meals and hairstyles of note, screenshots of text messages she loved or hated, her favorite paintings at the museum, her friends’ smiling faces, flowers she saw at the grocery store.

She writes her books on her bedroom walls: in the posters and drawings, ticket stubs and candy wrappers, paintings and calendar pages, album covers and photostrips from her last dance. On her laptop: the stickers and tapes she lovingly collected and arranged. In her closet: all the things that don’t fit, that won’t fit, all the twirls of fabric worn down by sun, the sweaters heavy with old perfumes.

She writes her books on her skin, in the little tics and scars, arms and legs, like notches on a prison wall: I’m counting days, I’m counting days. She writes her books in her mouth, the advice she gives, the smiles she cracks, the kisses she leaves: It’s ok, you should call me, I love you. She writes books in her mind, twirling tales that will never see the page, fantasy people without faces or names, speeches she could never give, confessions she isn’t brave enough to make, confessions she doesn’t think anyone could take.

And of course, as all humans do, the teenager writes her books in words, on pages. Songs that are too shy to leave her notes app, stories on the internet, novels that sit in her computer. Poetry that moves across paper pages, no, not like that, not like that, or that either. Poetry that’s scribbled over and torn up, the scraps as much part of the book as everything else she writes.

Summer Hu

The Cosmic Loneliness of the Unmated

Two cranes perched on a mossy rock. Two beaks curled into union. Legs, bent like steel wires, folded into isosceles triangles near their knobby knees. The blanket of the lake billows as the cranes perform their mating rituals: cream-colored wing-tips dancing along the surface of the sky, long necks reaching out to one another. Feathers burst in a confetti of consummation and celebration. As the feathers fall, stick, and are sullied in the boggy weeds below, pan, but only for a second, to the black crow squawking between the marsh reeds. From their higher vantage, all the cranes see is a misshapen charcoaled oval within the muddy, grease-laden marsh. Floundering in the inkwells, the crow dips his beak and scratches it against a nearby rock to carve a mark, a sign into its surroundings. Alas, his being fades into the potent blackness. He looks up. A wreath of feathers still looms over him, taunting him, threatening to close the only porthole to the blank, blue sky. He does not blink. The long reeds cover up his glossy eyes and oil-slick feather coat. They dampen the sound of his cries. Hidden from society. He sits there for eternity.

*title taken from a line in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Sentience

1. Hatred bleeds in the cellar, cowering amongst the shelves packed with wine bottles

A gaping gash, bubbles warm, hot blood, congealing into beads.

The glass shard is still pointed at her bosom as water falling from her eyes scatter into a map of rivers

The wound mends itself.

2. Altruism sprouts from the concrete poured by the stiffened hands of old construction workers

But he is sick. His voice evaporates into thin, twirling butterflies Legs collapse under the weight of his torso

He labors to raise himself out of bed, but is buried within the blankets smothering his lungs

Swimming in salty pools of sweat, he dons a toupee of golden threads, while biting a sandwich of gravel

Yoonsuh Kim

“Stop”

That midwinter night, when the scattered dust of the stars fell on these orchids growing over the marching ants wavering in the trees' breath with the threads of your hair, the solstice made the moon stutter, and he drew out the lines of Orion to send notes down to you or to show something in his luminescence hidden before in the snowbanks we can beg for silver sent to us or at us or to be us or, for our souls to be barkless trees and lilting signals until, at the brink of slumber, in the dark, under light lines, will they, for the dark, let me sing our ballads through the cracks of this stale air? Please, and the golden summer will promise you this much, let the oaks have a half a faith and send them to bed; the veined leaves falling unfailingly until, at the stubborn end of men and spring, our men trek the fading forest in the midnight for missing rain but in their midst the shadow-birds will chant "stop".

Ants

I have a dozen frozen Wednesdays to give you. Tuesday nights Shift strangely, leave time suspended. When morning comes, I Drink two cups of coffee and leave my shadow behind. The birds and the bacteria are the only things left alive. I paint them both. In this universe, God projects them across the city skyline. People lift their eyes to the stars–ad sidera–and exhale. The smoke of their breath adds clouds to their painted skies, but the sun's coalescing hydrogen will always spin an eternal duet with the moon.

On Wednesday I cast two dimes into a fountain. A woman sprouts From its center, spewing rotten water from her mouth. I wish to be an artist. All the eyes in the universe remain fixed on the sunbleached Asphalt. My mother told me a fortune-teller named me in exchange For twenty cents. I know, always, that every birth is a fated thing. The sun elongates my faded, fated, shadow When the stars rise, Two magpies take the place of the spiraling moon.

Sixteen years ago, on Wednesday, my mother promised me the world, so I told the moon I'd have the world or nothing. I'll live forever on this promise of tomorrow This story is never going to close. I've Started this day, week, month, one thousand, five hundred, and Sixty eight times. I have yet to finish it. I live on shattered wishes, Green glass bottles colonizing the ocean. I am Frankenstein, Okazaki, Beautiful. When this day ends and starts again and again and again I'll Leave my shadow behind so it doesn't drag me down.

On Thursday the birds fell from the sky, wax wings melted, Icarus Against the cement sea. I saw an umbrella bloom from the pavement, It's shadow wavering on the water below In my fifth floor apartment, an ant made its way across my fourth toe, ate my heart and sent me reeling. My soul folded into a neutron star. "You’re not an insect! You don’t Have six legs! Get back in your body!" And the universe's eyes lifted to the sky.

Harper Kodish

Old

Photographs

Eve is sitting in the car, her eyes tucked closed. She had refused the kind offers from the nurses for juice boxes and saltines that felt so foreign to her taste buds. She smiled politely each time they’d insisted, pressing the cotton to her own arm, cleaning the prick of the blood herself. She had known what would happen, that she would get sick, but Eve hadn’t cared. Her mother turned the car into an icebox with the air conditioning. She took over the radio, the station turned down low. The air blowing out of the vents almost completely obscures the voice of her favorite comedian. Eve put one headphone in one ear and kept the other free to the world. The car stops as the light moves up from yellow to red. It does so gently, not forcing Eve to wince at a sudden jerk.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her mother ’s phone light up with a fresh notification. The phone rested on the console table, balancing delicately on the cup holder. She didn’t stop her mom as she reached for the phone. They are at a red light, it’s fine.

“Oh,” her mom grunts, looking at whatever it is, “look.” Eve didn’t hear her mother, too swept up in the music. “Eve, look.” She taps her on the shoulder urgently. The dark blue phone case presses an indent into her shoulder

“What?” She snaps at her mom, taking out the earbud. She grabs the phone only because her mom starts to drive again. She glances at the top of the screen, the phone is opened to an email on the screen with photos from July sixth, the same day as today, just eight years ago. had been on July sixth. It was an email meant to pull her back in time.

She knows she won’t get dragged into the past; there is no past to drag her into. Eve can’t remember anything that happened before she got sick. It was just another thing that the disease took from her She’s been aware of this for a year now, silently, never telling a soul. The stories of her childhood were taken from the lips of her parents and regurgitated when convenient. Everytime she repeats the story there is more of a distance between her and it. She's reading a paper someone had written for her to read. She accepted the fact that the monster had taken away the time before the pain, leaving her with only the memory of after. She had already mourned the pain until that too became someone else’s. Eve glances at the photos.

A small girl with pink, sunburnt skin smiles up at the camera that was shoved in her face. Her mouth was too big for her head, pushing the apples of her cheeks up and up. Her green eyes turned into slits. She sat in the sand, her feet crossed. The first picture displayed her in all her smiling glory, behind her was a half built sand castle. The second had the girl holding up a stick she had found a few moments ago. The girl’s lips were pulled down low, her dark blonde eyebrows pushed into her eyes, in the frame taken after. The stick looked like a blurb of mud as the girl was in the motion of putting it down. The last of the photos showed the sunburnt girl glaring up at the camera, wanting to be done with being the muse.

I watched the camera with a pouty face. I didn’t want to take photos. I wanted to build my sandcastle. The waves were about to make a full attack, I felt like I needed to work quickly The white of the sea caps drew closer every single second. “Just one more,” my mother promised me, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. I could not see the honesty or lack thereof in her.

Eve finishes orienting herself back into the car, she puts the phone on her lap. Looking up at the drawn closed sunroof, she swipes escaped tears out from her cheeks.

Angelina Anh Laute Bildungsroman

Infancy –to tread

the sky between

twinkling little stars in between

Beyond the ceiling, in nursery rhymes.

Bedtime stories sing to she: The girl’s listening. She’s glistening.

Dad’s German. Mom’s Vietnamese. The girl’s golden hair sharpens the four tones of Chinese. Swap soft pillows for scraped knees. But a foreign face. Effaced. Her words speak sharper than those who slit her lip: 星

What lies beyond this ceiling?

Winter gives mercy to no child – no child gives mercy to she. She solemnly stands on the side of the sand –the pit that was the stage that was the hand that did not applaud when she found the word that ascended spring: poetry

A flower bud’s slit blossoms like the sun risen The rest of third grade preferred not to listen.

The wren sheds her feathers. Still, her dog tears at her sweater

She glitters, still.

Sechs – the age the Angel in her name takes flight

Dress down day is always fun to Mount Helicon

Musing the muses’ amusement

This is why I write.

Calliope

so the cauldron says – acu-women

No longer alone – the other eight had slit too. – the other eight had slit too. her first dance.

The land seems scorching pen pasted paper placated perfidious palm at 8 – dazzles 10 Glistening.

And now they listen. As she births beautiful phrases on Dad’s 65th, his friends cry as if she was their daughter too she cries and writes P.S. “I love you” with her lips to the Asian boy who strokes her golden hair that rests on a pillow whose creases cup puddles that trace back to lachrymose for when she writes the inevitable poem that cries goodbye from in the skies, chin down, to the four-ring roads that spell out a circle that circles home: 京

What lies beyond this ceiling?

She will not to the commands of marching She will not for songs heard in secrecy She will not for conflagration and perpetuation But billows on high for future children capturing Gaia:16 – she wings flowers from her spine.

Rachel Lewis Eternity Ink

The sun beats down on a green summer my gaze is directed to the sky the earth cradles my aching bones two sonic wingbeats cut through the silence abdominal muscles tense as I rise from my rest

A black bird leers from its mighty perch, and its beak falls open but the sweet melody of its song is not heard

A scolding squawk echos, “What are you doing?” like a parent, disappointed with their child. The bird is met with a blunt response “Writing.”

The bird is not satisfied, “why?”

Silence fills the air, I cannot answer the bird extends its wing, “Let me show you why.”

I look into its empty eyes, there is no reaction, no light, there is nothing.

“I don’t understand.”

“Then you’re on the path to the answer.” I stare into the bird’s eyes a little longer Darkness, emptiness, I stare until the black irises consume me. My eyes roam, but there is only darkness.

I squint my eyes, and look a little closer, A faint white glow can be seen.

I stand and stare, it takes my stillness as an invitation to approach. The light grows closer, and when it reaches me it shows me a bright world of life, a gray world of death, and everything in between.

And I walked on the Heavens blue skies turned to faded orange and soft pink.

The moon conquered her throne above again as the sky turned to a inky pool crowned with diamonds of stars. My fingers entangled in the dark wisps of clouds When I reached the end I fell from a shattered sky

And the ground embraced me once more. when I rose again, a bird’s wings beat twice Its eyes bore into mine So I answered;

We write so the birds can have voices that mimic our own We write so we can venture where our feet fail to take us

We write life, so we can better savor our own We write because we are temporary The ink from the pen will fade, the keys on a typewriter will break.

But our ideas are eternal.

Humans will die, but the words etched onto their tombstones will persist through triumph and trial.

Sophie Li Brain Translation

Perhaps it is like honey dew, sweet aphid waste, or bread on a hot, dry day, stuck in my throat, on the roof of my mouth, between my teeth. A delicacy, swollen in places raw red and bone white. Somewhere, between the space behind my eyes and the flat of my tongue, the hallowed echo and the gnawing ache, a sticky honeyed dew, man’s most precious nectar webs and drips, jumbles and knots, and I am a fly, trapped. A defilement.

Something’s Ablaze

It’s the hearth, surely. Those warm, crackling golden flakes, popping into a sharp, blue night. Each inhale, inviting a lungful of feathery grey, grainy vision, on fingers pinkened, palms stiff, a smile, palmed, pink.

No, not palmed. Flames cannot be held, no matter their flashing and twisting, an invitation lined in ochre and rose.

It’s the coal, yes, the coal dark as an eye, crumbling into each other—

It’s the cold, must be the cold, shrill as a blade, icy touches—

It’s the smoke, fire’s impurities, hazy and curling around flickering tongues of soft reds— it’s just the glowing embers, just the shining core, the golden hands, the rose sharp smile, it’s just the hearth, really.

Ash Luu Envythra

Envy subsides not in actions nor speech, but the crevices and corners that I wander as most people do quite frequently. It is those cerebral caverns she dwells in first. Envythra, her name, in which the Hellenes thought cautiously of the slain Python rather than the lady renowned for stone eyes. The namesake of our tunnel loitering maiden, a tribute to the lord of laurels and foil lyres.

But however grand, this origin does not quell her use for serpents, for greed is not uncommon but protruding. Its sinking fangs pierce my crimson rooms and skin ridden doors that litter this coiling labyrinth. Her contorting body, sends her talons scraping concrete gashes, row upon row of seeping velvet underneath my stained skin. Her hissing nest of children twist my lobes and nostrils, intertwining one and the same. The mind commands and the body obeys. Because what do men and women of contortion do if not distort, if not command my empty husk, empty house of a wretched body. I try to stop her, command her but even yet her brethren listen to no one. What serpentine child of needs and greed listens to its mother?

“It congregates first,” she whispers saccharine, sickly “Leaves you drowning; and a drowned man is nothing if not desperate,”

Her lacy scales and faulty crown act as some sort of beacon; guiding and alluring, her marionettes like sailors hung, dancing on a lighthouse’s strings. Her naked slopes and rolling hills are barren yet alive. Seductiveness in Mother Nature’s rawest. Even snakes take refuge in her arms. A Mother to all and Envythra, mother to no one except her caverns, treasures her namesake.

And as all of Mother ’s children do, come tumbling home, Envythra buries her hatchlings in the walls of labyrinths like mine and pays a certain homage to blood, Ouroboros. In mourning she still contorts, still allures, melting scales and shaven crown; Ouroboros anew

Lillie Markel Iris

When it began he was in the third-floor restroom of a little regarded museum of local art: the last gasp of a small town that clung to the hope its dying was not yet over and as the sun rose there was culture to be had and held—in sunless plaster walls—where damp coldness bred as it would in a bolted mausoleum. The third floor was reserved for the restless dead—sculptures veiled until their procession down the stairs every few months—a changing of the spectral guard. The statues themselves were dilapidated not in the explosive beauty of Roman lost limbs and shattered ribs but in the way a man’s words trailed off when he saw the sea for the first time. The rain on this particular day began shortly after midnight and continued like the steady pulse of blood within the veins of the flesh of the heavens and even with an umbrella in his hand and an old overcoat his skin seemed dotted in the way of a pointellist figure and water shot from the points of his sneakers to batter the quiet shrouds not noticing through the fog of daily troubles until an unprotected canvas was struck—the familiar sound of muffled violence.

He cursed but What did it matter when pieces were left to rot or be stolen? he could’ve taken any painting he chose to hang on his walls if he were a man of more greed than indifferent destruction. But he was a man of guilty conscious and he thought of the great works he’d seen in well-endowed museums—Van Goghs and Monets and Kahlos—he remembered how Van Gogh died irrelevant how he must’ve been discovered in refuse such as this and he may very well have flung a bucket not on garbage but on the face of Starry Night itself when he disregarded the disregarded.

He could take a shovel and dig up another Van Gogh but he lifted the corner of his shirt and performed a quiet act of care with all the love he’d seen in animals who cleaned their young with their tongues. He chose the stall furthest from the door to wring out his shoes in the toilet when he felt a gentle tremor as if a great insect had flapped its wings beneath the earth. The tremor ceased. His mind moved on to the business at hand and his pants were around his ankles when a second tremor came—this time with rage—and the dripping like oil or quiet tears both of which prevailed disaster He struggled to turn the wheel to a fresh roll of toilet paper by the time he had the floor was covered in a layer of water thin as paper. Droplets sprouted from a thousand miniscule holes in the walls in the floor in the ceiling—even in the stall doors it seemed— first it resembled condensation until the seeds sprouted to streams. Even when he washed his hands the water would not cease to run when he shut off the tap. He waded to the specters now fluttering and dancing for the first time in

their shallow pool and he thought they seemed happy. Water lapped at the top stair spilling onto his floor like a dam had burst but there were no damn nearby nor could he still hear the rain on the roof for when he wrenched away the shades he was greeted by bright sun on dazzling sea—cloudless and blue in reflection—but the sea was supposed to be a hundred miles away not inches away from the lip of the window and he saw below like giant whales the homes of people he’d known and the streetlights like coral and the cars like clams and knew the same horror Adam would’ve felt at a razed Eden. He saw the painting he’d wiped before drowning in a 3-foot tide and the painting and he were one. In the corner was a lovely figure nose pressed to veil. He waded to her and looked upon her dusty bosom for the first time in years and held her perfect little fingers that flexed in a way perfect a figure of Helen she must’ve been but not ivory in in the old way— colorful—blue and pink and red and yellow and great green! Her perfect human shape only exacerbated by her inhuman contour

Iris he said.

Iris of a material he’d never seen and he saw his own frightened face in those frightening colors because beneath the dust she was polished and he knew this rising tide would purify her—clean her and adore her as she never was before. When every painting fell apart in the new sea she would remain as bodies ceased to breathe because she had no lungs.

As the Kahlos and Monets and even Van Goghs were consumed she would remain.

He took her in his arms to the stairwell waist deep to find the ladder onto the roof. He sat her in the center—the roof her ark.

His cigarettes were soaked and his lighter was dead he laid them at her feet and sat beside her transfixed—glad at the shapes the light drew on the ground through her skin.

Sure as the sun rose

the water would drain and she would stand here gravemarker to be paraded in honor to a museum where nothing was allowed to rot. The water slunk across the roof. He lay out on the roof and let it lap his feet—reminded of a quiet shore and a moment of peace.

Savannah Massey Between the Summer Months

I’ll look for you and your humor and your freckles and your love between the summer months.

I’ll look in the crowds of people bustling, job to job, in the crowds of people living but not really living.

I’ll pick out pieces of you and roll them around my mouth like watermelon seeds from the fruit on July days with my cousin.

I asked her, my cousin, and she agreed: some parts of you are wandering / warm / watching and the other parts are sugary sweet / soft / sticky, aren’t they?

They tangle together, just like our fingers / legs / lives —just like us.

bad habits for sale

You swear there’s an ache growing on the avenue between here and the home that’s not even yours anymore. You called, from across the country. just to ask if I missed the nights sometime between September and October

[when the thrift store folding chairs supported our bad habits. We tried blowing smoke rings in your backyard. Yours were always X’s and O’s but mine came out as shapeless puffs.]

I answered that Fall wasn’t an option for us, no matter how hard we wished it was. And told you the FOR SALE sign didn’t take away anything that wasn’t already gone. You swear, you don’t mind the distance anymore but the plane tickets in your search history and a half-full piggy bank gave you away.

Iyona Meadows Around the Fire

Rex shook in terror as the fire glistened in the night. His skin was damp with swamp water and his clothes were ripped from spiky thorns. He had scars from vigorously scratching mosquito bites that began to bleed. The air was cold in the woods where they camped and the heat from the blaze didn’t do much to warm his tired body, and his pain felt deeper than the ocean that surrounded the Island and confined them to their deserted prison. Rex looked up at Keylee who had been his best friend since kindergarten, she sat a few feet to the right of him. Her dark brown eyes were watery as she watched Jay whimper in pain. Jay held the open wound on his side with both of his hands right below his ribcage. His blue Dodgers jersey was now stained with his blood and parts of it appeared purple in the dim light of the flame. His eyes fluttered open and closed while he tried his best to remain conscious despite the fact that he understood his fate. The regret in her face and eyes was visible. Keylee knew Jay was withering away. They all did, in fact. However, it was too late to apologize because what good could it have done? Anything she could say right then wouldn’t matter, for his time was running out and nothing she could do would change that. Rex could see what she meant, he always could, but “sorry” would just be wasting her breath. All they needed was silence, and that was good because that was all Keylee could offer.

The five of them- Rex, Keylee, Jay, Callie, and Christian- sat in a circle with large gaps between them, with the exception of Jay leaning his head on Callie’s leg, who stroked his curly, black hair ever so gently with a shaky hand. Her face was pointed up at the star covered sky, staring at the crescent moon above their heads. Something about the eeriness of the dark made her shiver in fright. It was a strange quiet that she wasn’t used to in the buzzing metropolis of

New York city where she and her friends resided. The tangled emotions of the day somehow made the night colder, and the rustling of the trees in the distance louder, and the pain in her shoulder more agitating. It made her doubt that she’d ever be back at home with her family, smiling and laughing like in that one photograph clipped onto the refrigerator door from when they first moved in, a few months before her father died. That picture was now just a distant memory of when life was good. Suddenly, all Callie could think about was the last words she said to her mother and sister as she tried desperately to drown out the sound of her own voice in her head telling her that death was near and no one was coming for them. What a day, she thought to herself. She blinked and felt a stream of tears roll down her face.

Claire Meyer

Mushrooms as Proof

In the bedroom where I left my sister, lungs still, I find her form beneath the rosy covers of her bed. Through the skylight, clouded with time and dead ants, the sun creeps in to ignite the dust motes in the air. She has rotted here like a grape too long on the vine. I sit on the edge of the bed and fit myself into her indent in the mattress. When were we last here together? I remember the hushed voices, the hand forming a channel between her lips and my ear, the ticklish whisper of her breath.

Her hand lifted the duvet to let me in. I slipped into the curve of her body. It was longer than mine, lanky with new growth. Across the pillow her hair spiraled into a language I didn’t know

“Were you afraid?” she asked. In the night both of us were quiet. To be otherwise felt like a transgression against the natural order.

“Not this time,” I lied. The space between sheets and skin was cool. I pulled my bare foot, jutting into the hungry dark, onto the bed. Alone in the hallway, I had invented monsters to fill it with.

“Let me tell you a story.” My sister leaned in closer. The moonlight through the fabric painted her skin pale blue as if in a room of stained glass. “Once a girl wandered into a garden and began to take root…” she began, and I didn’t believe her

Down the sagging stairs and into the yard where my sister ’s bones are buried. Dusk creeps over the long grass. I will plant a garden here, but flowers still die on holy ground. The blackberry bushes are winning their long war for dominion over the lawn, their brambles tangles that rip at the flesh of my ankles. In the midsummer, they teem with old berries, most of them

picked into pieces by the foraging birds that sing my sister ’s requiem. I tug a blackberry free from the limb that birthed it and place it on my tongue. It’s unclean with dirt and no telling what else, but I doubt that this will be the thing to kill me.

My teeth sink in. It tastes of ash.

Blackberry juice stained my sister ’ s mouth. She pulled them from the vine into plastic buckets, waiting to be eaten with cream or made into cobblers. In the heat I watched her through heavy-lidded eyes. Sweat stuck my clothes to my skin. I stole another berry from the bucket and savored its tartness on my tongue. It was never just one. I kept reaching for more.

My sister smacked my hand away “Not until we wash them.”

“You’re doing it,” I accused her

“I’m older.” She’d said it so often it had become liturgy The words justified themselves and built worlds I was by nature unable to understand but dreamed of discovering. “If you’d help we could go inside sooner.”

I laid back in the weeds. They tickled the undersides of my arms where the flesh was paler like the belly of a dog. “No,” I teased, “I have time to waste.”

My sister ’s footprint, smaller than mine now, lingers pressed into the hallway carpet. The whorls of the pad of her thumb decorate the fridge handle in sticky jam. Slowly the lines of the state fair caricature hanging in her room fade and yellow

Outside the grass, in its doomed cycle of growth and lawnmower devastation, has never known her footsteps. The birds that bloomed from their shells this year did not watch her through the windows, and the pine tree she carved her initials into had to be torn down.

May Miller

Peppercorn

Sometimes I look you dead in the middle of the chest

With stone-cutter eyes, lazer irises. I’m trying To break your Heart, crushed in my palms dripping red from plain white like a reopened wound - beware, because brutalized blood shines brighterI can feel your chisel chip away my rough corners, your radio heartbeat

Like static swimming through my capillaries, like prions ache to degenerate Unmake me, forgive and Forget.

I am unspooling- that purple taste of arms and chests curved like riverbends Sowing fire in my blue stomach. I drink that smoke, airborne, Numbing my hive. It seeps through my skin like ink - this moment, Lymphatically so, my marble flesh flakes to the floor. Is this Soft love in the form of my own barrier, my own skin? For I am boundless, skinless, a supernova.

Delmore

With pink bowed lips

This young boy, my baby

Sweetheart who drank himself to death In Dreams

My love, Who lived years ago An apparition star

Who left here weeping, hotel rooms

Weep too

My son, formidable In his handsome youngness

Married twice an Idealist Love

Lapsed Love

But time’s

The fire in which We burn? We burn like alcohol

Consuming throats and livers and

Sons’ lives

And I, Fled Romania

To birth hope, to birth you

The enigma, the squanderer… …Naïve

Summon Those moments, then With your little brown eyes

You holding my index finger

My care

Recall Us, together, We fried jam papanași

A thread of spit ran from your mouth Too hot

Maybe though, In Baudelaire, Your love for me increased Papa left us and I’m long dead

Although

My Boy Vaudevillian,

I am your mother, and I am always armed to stone you With love

Delmore, You doomed genius Impossible, tragic

Look how we dine upon your cliffs

Of hope

Lily Miller

There and Then Gone

Together,

We bought the daisy dress I’m wearing now

You spun me around the sidewalk

As if no one was watching

Because you paid for it with the first check

From a job you promised would hold us tight and safe. Together, We stepped into our new house, And I wish the rubble didn’t still smell of fresh paint. The keys still jangling in our pockets, You turned on the radio

And we danced to a song I don’t remember now

Until we both collapsed, Tired and happy

Onto the couch that was your parents’ wedding present. Together,

We sat on twin rocking chairs, Watching the days pass us by

As if we had so many to waste. Every once in a while, We’d both look over At each other

And smile as if we had a secret. We are not together now.

Because I am here, on this sparse ship of survivors, Reeling from the devastation And trying to exist in what has been left behind, Scrawling by candlelight because Now I know to leave some record of life.

I am here in the dress you got me, Surrounded by your traces, Scrubbing memories of screaming and fire, So much fire, from my haunted eyes.

And you are buried in the splinters of rocking chairs and scraps of fresh paint, In the house where we were together, Which now holds only one of us, And neither ’s soul.

The Walk

The walk to the store is five minutes. Maybe six.

Her feet know the way. Motions well-learned, each step accounted for. People drive by in cars. They do not see her But that is no issue. She sees them. Each sound they make is familiar. She clutches a notebook. It is leather and worn near to exhaustion. She opens the door to the shop. The bell rings behind her She knows this sound, too.

Her browsing is a formality She buys what she always does: gum and a ballpoint pen. Other customers circle the shelves. They do not see her. The bell as she leaves does not reach them. She retraces her steps. Clicks her pen. Holds her notebook closer. She reaches her porch. Sits down. Watches. Scribbles something. Cyclists and pedestrians travel through her street, And the world around her goes on and on, Stuck in an endless cycle she could inscribe

Like music notes on lined-paper staffs. They do not see her.

But they will.

Parisa Nosrati

The Eye of the Beholder

She looked like a flowing wave on a sentient beach. Like a flower sprouting out of tranquil terrain. Like the wondrous shapes that stars create beneath the royal hue of the sky Her golden hair shined brightly, illuminating the natural highlights on her cheeks. Her long eyelashes reached out to where she looked, delicately brushing against each other with each timely blink. Her shimmering skin and soft silhouette held such grace with each fluid movement. As she pranced through the town, she held a large red rose in her hand, twirling the stem between her fingers to match the rhythm with which she walked. All anyone wanted to do was watch her gait, study her features, glare into the depths of her ocean blue eyes that sparkled with evanescence. But alas, no one had truly seen her No one could truly see her Perhaps her most beautiful feature was her eyes. They glistened gently below her soft chestnut brows. What was most spectacular about her eyes, however, is that no one could look at them.

Many years ago, the red rose the woman carried was solely a bare stem, yearning for petals to make it as beautiful as the one who holds it. A young girl, entranced by the alluring nature of this woman, approached the figure with care. The woman did not notice her, she only continued dancing alone in place. The young girl furrowed her brow, not understanding the woman flailing her arms aimlessly in the air The young girl sat and watched her for hours, studying every crevice of her body and the way each bone moved in harmony with the others. What the young girl truly longed to see, however, was the woman’s face. After watching her for hours, all the young girl saw was a silhouette of the woman’s nose. The young girl tapped the

slender woman on her bony shoulder, to which the woman turned around with a genuine grin on her face. The young girl had never seen such a stunning complexion. They stared into each other ’s eyes, the young girl yearning for her ocean blue eyes, smooth skin, pink shiny cheeks, and bright heart-shaped lips. The young girl touched her own face as she glared at the features of the woman, running her hands down her bumpy forehead, her luscious cheeks, and her chapped lips. She imagined what it would feel like to possess the woman’s features, to run her hands down her face and feel a smooth forehead, defined cheekbones, and plump lips. Neither of them took their eyes off of each other. The woman only held up her rose, and uttered, “Come with me,” elongating her hand for the young girl to take. The young girl took her hand, hoping the action would bless her with the beauty she just discovered that she had been missing out on. However, when the young girl took her hand, she vanished, and emerged as a red petal on the woman’s rose. The woman granted the young girl the privilege to watch her forever, and be part of her beauty.

For the rest of her eternal life, the beautiful woman entrapped young insecure girls in her web, building her red rose more and more with each terrorized petal. Her victims were forced into a life of constant envy and self-hatred, wishing they had never doubted the beauty within themselves.

Abraham Perry

John’s Stumble

John took a stumble into a pond; he did, In a pond where John took a stumble: On a cold, freezing winter day, All John could do was pay, In a pond where John took a stumble!

And when John swam around and around, His mom yelped, “John, you’ll just go down!”

The town hollered, “Oh John, just get out, you dirty pig!”

John said, “It would be easy if I weren’t so big!”

In a cloudy pond where John still lay, If only John’s mood weren’t so gray, The town, only to continue shrieking with fear, Well, John, could you be a dear, Get out of that pond, my fellow man John, If not, this might soon be a swan song!

And John took a stumble into a pond; he did!

John floats above the pond; he does, In a pond where John hovers above: On a scalding, burning summer night, John might’ve felt pretty tight, In a pond where John still drifts to this day!

And when John jumped and almost got out, His mom sighed, “John, what are you even about?!”

The town chortled, “John get out you musty twig!”

John cried, “It would be easy if I weren’t such a dig!”

In a clear pond where John hovers today, If only John could just float far away, The town, only to continue sleeping in peace, Well, John, rub off that grease! Get out of that pond, my fellow man John, If not, this might soon be a swan song! And John lays in the pond; he does!

John lay still as a log; finally!

Finally, John lay still as a log: On a neutral, uninteresting spring afternoon, John Might finally be gone pretty soon, In a pond where John lay as still as a log!

And when John didn’t twitch a muscle, His mom joyfully cried, “Looks like John can’t hustle!”

The town exclaimed, “John, get out of the nasty pond!”

John couldn’t talk back; John wasn’t fond! In a drought where John lay still, If only John’s fate weren’t a spill, The town, only to continue with their lives, Well, John, looks like you should've listened! You can’t get out of that pond, my fellow dead man John, Because this is already a swan song! And John lays still in a pond he does!

Reyna Radhakrishnan

iPad in a Natatorium

The metal is soothing on my fingers

Silver like a pebble, but smooth like velvet

The pad lights up my plush cheeks

A girl’s face frowns up at me

It is my duty to mend her

You start with a face mask

That magically cures her impurities

Then you brush her hair

Which reveals her long silky locks

My brows furrowed with concentration

While my sister raced against time

Now you can change her eye color

Pink, blue, green, hazel

Never the coffee brown that fills my iris

A row of makeup now fills the bottom

Even more options to choose from

My mom yells loudly in the background:

Hurry! Go! Go!

I’m going! I’m going! She will make it to the ball!

Next is the dress

Long and fluffy or short and sweet

Sparkly and blinding or soft and pearly

What shows her off best

Cowbells ring in my ears, the scent of chlorine now gone

This is it.

We get to pick the boy next.

I always pick the jock anyway

A buzzer sounds as I take screenshot of my creation

My mom is jumping with my dad

People around me are screaming

I know, I know

I am an artist

Theodore Radkov

SELF PORTRAIT OF THE TRANSGENDER UNDEAD

He slinks through the aisles of the gas station, surrounded by mass-produced products propped up in rows. The air is syrupy, all food dyes and flavorings and empty calories. You, a stranger, look up to meet false eyes and soft features; he’s a boy excited to meet you like a lamb excited to meet its slaughterer.

Later you will feel unshaven skin and shallow breaths under your touch. But when you sink your scalpel into the boy's tender flesh and pry into his guts, searching for any real meat, it’ll be the same substanceless aisles of the gas station. His voice is a fire alarm that sounds like laughter after you inhale enough smoke, his hands wander like they're hungry He is the green ooze of old science fiction movies, he is the rotting corpse of the girl in his own bedroom. He is factory-built Frankenstien, mixing and matching body parts to become his own monster. He is unnatural. Maybe he likes it that way.

Sophia Rodkin The Sun

I wonder if the sun is lonely

Staying still

While everyone she cares about spins around her

Being seen

Only through tinted gazes and squinted eyes

I wonder if the sun feels guilty

Holding on

To planets that could otherwise roam free

Giving light

That often hurts the very people she is trying to protect

I wonder if the sun gets tired

Trying hard

To help and yet bearing the brunt of the world’s resentment

Knowing that

No one will ever understand the burden that she shoulders

I wonder if the sun feels angry

Burning bright

With flames that threaten to the scorch those who dare come near

Watching us

Decide that we are the real center of everything

I wonder if the sun is like me

Growing dim

As others slowly use up her precious light

Saying that

She will rest but knowing that she never will.

Doomsday Delirium

How long must I apologize For things I never said?

How long must I keep running from The voices in my head?

The river ’s red with blood, and all The streets are filled with glass, While I stare at the ceiling and Romanticize the past.

I listened to a spinning song, Now I move round and round, While five-inch heels are echoing Like gunshots on the ground.

Look right into my eyes, and tell Me; what is it you see?

Just hold me tight and don’t become A faded memory

Ainsley Rowland

The Clouds Shelter the Stars

I wonder

Your gaze, beyond retention

Like there is something in the way

Things go.

A placebic mydriasis, The sky empty

A body without eyes

Not black, but nothing

Picking at the seams of value, Mimicking graphite on paper.

Nothing

Just overcast

The stars hiding like schoolgirls in a game of hide and seek

Because stardust is finite A nonrenewable resource

Falling off them like snowflakes

From the laughter

A perverted pixie dust.

The clouds that act as your disguise Harbor a falsified pareidolia, A betrayal of imagination.

However will I wonder if the cumulus is calling me

Spelling out the words in the spaces it was not.

So many colors I will never be able to see The only way to imagine ultraviolet Is violet.

I envy the butterfly, as violet is not a constraint.

What was she sorry for, A grief beyond death

That lingers in the grave

Ignorant of its bounds. It permeates the soil

Making friends with the dirt that encased where they laid. Encompassing, With no cardinal direction.

I am afraid my time will come, And I will see the light, but it will be Fluorescent.

Not ultra in the slightest. Because even in death, Logic remains.

Kailin Shi

Limbo

On her visits, my mother would ask for biking in central park through marbled light, picnickers and squirrels in the Big Apple. I’d say I didn’t care for it: I’m used to the city now, I’d say to her, In hopes of feeling less like an interloper. But I’d remain reticent as she picked out a tandem, A reminder that she’d come cross water, my steady emblem of home as I tread through limbo.

And I couldn’t help but laugh as we swooped downhill, My surroundings blurring away into the current of our speed, So fast that I couldn't tell if we would emerge from our momentum Into a dream I had often; A return to Beijing, The draft of passing cars, flashes of ginkgo, my hands on the bars, My sweat tasting sealike.

Lauren Stephan Childhood Bedroom

It was infested with pink; pink carpet, pink walls, pink bed, pink everything. Toys were littered around the floor, my Sesame Street purse, stuffed animals, plastic horses, babies I pretended to care for, and a giant fake kitchen where I cooked for my brothers. Drawings of my family and pets adorned the walls like paintings in the Louvre. I jumped on my bed and laughed until my voice went hoarse and stars twinkled above my head like a crown. I was a god amongst mortals in that room, I had control over everything, where my stuffies went, how my room was organized, and who was allowed in it. A sign on my door handle read “No Boys Allowed,” to further state the message. This was my childhood bedroom.

Currently, Barbie and Ken are about to get married in a wedding with all my toys. The wedding would later be interrupted by another Barbie who claimed that she loved Ken more than the OG Barbie and to run away with her, but before I could get to that footsteps bounded down the hallway, the pitter patter uneven. Before I could close the door my brother came charging in, in his Thomas the Tank Engine-themed pajamas and cowboy boots. He took one look at the wedding and decided the marriage needed to be annulled before it even started. Without a word, he brought down his boot so hard he crushed the wedding crasher ’s head in with a single stomp. Remarkable for a kid only five years old.

“These dolls are dumb like you, Sissy! Play cowboys with me!”

My little brother ’s snotty voice echoed in my ears, soon becoming so annoying I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached my arms from my sitting position and slashed my nails across his face. The blood that poured from his nose trickled down onto his pajamas and he let out a scream.

The Lycan

So ruthless, so brutal, yet so timid

It stands by my door, as far as it will go

Baring its teeth, its hackles raised past its limit

The lunges scare me a little as I walk on my tiptoes, Trying to brace my heartbeats per minute, This is it, so I say screw it.

Its fur is black like the abyss

The cavernous opening is a blight to my sight

Yet beautiful like a fleur-de-lis

It almost makes the beast look dight

Its teeth are stained red, remnants, I suppose Poor Francine, Missy, and Theodore in their fright

They never stood a chance against a beast with such a portfolio

The beast ate nearly everything on our farm beside us, Until about a fortnight ago when Theo went missing.

A baby bonnet was found, only God could leave a man such a husk.

Next was my wife, Francine, she was gulped down in three bites, all the while hissing

Next was my little girl, Missy, down in one bite, didn’t see a spray of blood while in the dusk

The lashing of teeth broke the trance, bringing the end of the dance

Only the dead will see the end of this battle

When it circled, I circled

When it stepped forward, I stepped back

I do not want to see myself be killed

I see an opening and take attack

Reaching the axe on the wall, I split the Earth with one swing.

The floor shattered and no wolf to be found at all

Standing with a bloody axe, in the corner, I spot my wife’s ruby ring

When they found the bodies in the river, those who found them retched. Only the mountains know what happens to those who go mad.

Meriwether VandeSand

Nostalgic for The Summers Before

I remember when we were young and would sit in the grass; The green hills rolling into an endless countryside of forest and farmland. We knew off beyond the trees somewhere, there was London. But from the paradise we sat in, it was hard to imagine anything but the sprawling expanse of nature.

The great poets appreciate the wild beauty of the countryside by describing the breathtaking view with ink on paper,

But to little boys, admiration of the earth, worship of mother nature, was best performed through destruction.

We would steal pebbles from the banks of streams. We would pick wildflowers as we walked, dropping them mindlessly when we lost interest. We’d hit each other with cattails, pretending we were great heroes battling with swords. We would laugh when the ends exploded into seeds and fluff.We’d rip apart the grass when we sat in the field, for no reason then to feel the dirt under our nails and see the shreds strewn about our laps.

You’d call to me; “Kit, come here!” (back then it was always Kit, never Christopher) and I’d race over to you, running as fast as my knobbly legs would take me. And we’d walk hand in hand, two boys let loose in the forest.

When the sun had almost disappeared and the stars sparkled in the inky twilight sky, we’d make our way home, knowing our mothers were most likely worried sick. But when we reached

the fence we couldn’t bear to leave the fields we had spent so long in. We’d collapse there, our tired bodies entwined in the grass. Our white shirts always stained shades of green and brown.

You would smile and your sunburnt skin would crinkle your cheeks. We would sit there and wait to see how long we could stay together in paradise until the maids came out to scold us. And it was paradise. To be together was paradise.

Yet the night would always end. The winters would always come, bearing their bitter cold and hiding our paradise beneath blankets of ice. Someday we ought to have grown out of such lollygagging, but we never did, didn’t we?

We were older; young men with more complicated problems. These days we would pair our adventures with a bottle of whatever you could take without the notice of your father You would talk about whatever lover that was driving you mad. And I was always jealous, but always quiet. And we would sit in the grass, the moths fluttering in the darkness of twilight, the birds fluttering somewhere far away. And we would laugh together, we would cry together.

You would whisper “Kit, come here,” (always Kit, never Christopher) and I would move closer, resting my head softly on your shoulder. I would hold my breath, nervous to disturb you with our bodies so close. And we would enjoy the silence.

Yet the nights always ended and the winter always came.

And eventually, you left.

That was all so long ago, so very very long ago.

Bo Winn

Child of Gaia

Looking out from the shower, I hide myself in the steam. I am ashamed of my form, I do not want to see it.

Yet, still, I wipe away the fog of the mirror, And I am greeted with rolls of flubber At first, disgust fills me – I should be smaller than I am. But, slowly, I inhale the steam, and exhale self-loathing.

The warmth fills my lungs, and my mind, and me. I realize just how long I have hated my form; Despite being crafted within the image of Gaia. I am crafted in the image of Mother Earth.

The butter-like rolls melt in my hands; Stretch marks becoming canyons and rivers. From her body comes mine, And from my body comes love.

Elena Zhu Today I Will Write Something Happy

I have come to the conclusion that I write about too many sad things.

That I have taken my misery and hurled it into my journals, into my notes app, into my google docs. I have taken my discontentment and splayed it against my screen, furiously etched, justified by the noble cause of creating art. I have updated my anthology of sorrow and filed away hundreds of nights of teary stares against my laptop screen, fingers dancing over the keyboard, exchanging gentle words for those that bear knives. Because misery is art.

Misery is the language that transcends all barriers, spoken in the tongue of cumulative human experience. It is the suffering of the single and the comfort to the collective. It is a forum, and a haven, and a blanket of static. For years, I’d allowed myself to forget that a language as universal as misery cannot exist without its counterpart.

Happiness.

Today I will write something happy.

I will write for the girl I once was. I will write for the girl that once inhabited my skin, conjured self hatred and bitterness out of the 26 opportunities presented by the English alphabet to perpetuate joy. I will write for the girl who used these letters as bullets in a pistol when today I string them together and make bracelets.

I will write for fireflies, like the ones I once captured in a cup, eager to bring their light home. When they made their eventual escape, my bedroom glowed and twinkled with their bid for freedom. My ceiling became my very own galaxy, a shooting star zipping across my room, blinking before landing on my window. I will write for this personal galaxy of mine.

I will write for the oranges my father peels for me. His fingers stained orange so mine can pluck tender segments from the plate with ease as I do my homework each night. The scent of citrus lingers on his hands while I swallow the fruits of his labor without a second thought. I will write for oranges that have been peeled by gruff hands and passed on to softer ones.

I will write for eel rolls. For the sugary, viscous sauce that they are doused in. For their spindly, tender bones. These bones that get stuck in the back of my throat, eliciting my grimace and a large gulp of water. But I will always buy two packages of eel rolls, because my mom beams and kisses my cheek when I bring them home. I will write for the way her lips part in surprise, the way her eyes widen and for the way she grins.

I will write for the smaller cookie half, because it’s my duty as an older sister to relinquish its larger counterpart. I will write for the cake with less icing, the pizza with less pepperoni. I will write for this little sister, this best friend, the earliest hand I held.

I will write because I have ‘piano hands’ and an ability to create music that brings others joy Because I have an okay-ish sense of rhythm and can dance, slightly off kilter

I will write for the number eight, which happens to be my favorite and also looks like an infinity symbol standing upright.

I will write for all the heartfelt conversations inside friends’ cars, for all the love I am shown that I am not yet sure I deserve.

I will write because my favorite dessert is cheesecake.

I will write for Phoebe Bridgers.

I will write because I am no longer constrained by my misery.

I will write because I am no longer miserable.

I will write because I am happy.

Today I will write something happy.

Christiania Zidor Paperback Copy

the bird stands alone covered in embroideries and intricate designs silently chirping, searching for connection the harmonies elaborate, yet no one to hear the volume rises, out of desperation ajar is the mouth that does not seek meals but the consumption of another's presence

the lingering scent serves as a reminder of ownership even away, the magnolia fumes remain murmuring sinister nothings, as a reminder of the one in possession

the wasteland moves, bumping over and over the paperback not strong enough to hold its pages apart yet, the bird remains still confined to its white wasteland it echos its endless melodies, yearning for connection

but when the pages close and the bird is put away and its rhythms become staccato the embroidered bird realizes its fate and succumbs to the silence

Happy writing! -your Reynolds T.a.S