I’m Chemical

Da’oud De Lane // senior free-verse poem

A sheet of ripe skin conceals me. Tight, plump, and profuse, it will never feel as ravishing as it does covering me now.

Perhaps your grasp will allow me to value the blessings of mortality.

I’ve been harvested and now I fear demise.

My blood is pulsating, livid, and loud. I’m simply cultivated by the material of bone.

I am overflowing with life, blossoming, maturing, and just yet to reach my prime.

Study me, capture my essence and nature before I fall and expire.

What am I to do with all this chemistry?

Must I know, if I prospered?

Was the time spent flourishing distraught?

Why didn’t anyone tell me?

I was naive, now I’m capsized.

Is it too late to emerge, to explore the apex?

I am an organism, a biological beauty. Shelter me till the eleventh hour, never allow me to decay, preserve me, surely this isn’t it.

Pierce into me, surpass my organs and collide with my core, explore my avant-garde.

Hastily, fix my posture, hold me upright, water me, give me sunlight, caress me. Feel around my lumps of rot and spoil, the indicators of an arrest in my development.

I will not surrender to shuck and jive.

In the end, you do not, instead, you let me go. Now left just a seed of the cosmos, a pith lived and led to be consumed. I am chemical, that is all.

Lost Michael Campbell // senior free-verse poem

I walk in the door, I focus my eye

I look to my left, I look to my right I walk inside and I see white

Not many Black people in sight

White walls, white people, white drawers That doesn’t matter, I still open the door

As I leave that place, I wonder more Why aren’t there more people like me anymore?

In middle school, there were more of us all throughout I see them in my school without a doubt

But when I go to class, I feel cast out In these classes, they look to me for guidance, as we learn more

Especially when we talk about slavery and the civil war

I´m tired of reading white authors like Faulkner

I want to read Black authors and see more Black doctors multimedia

So I ask myself, where did we go?

What did we do?

Why am I in advanced classes with all white kids in a predominately Black school?

Max Burnham // freshman