Maryelle Waterhouse A Late Night

[A Late Night]

Maryelle Waterhouse

[is it ash or is it snow?]

grimy syringes administered, the boilers bleed. I don’t know if we are alive yet. lifeless shells, lay waste for who we plead. scabs and muck cover my wounds. a stray child, tumors, and crudes. lingering scent of all that is ill. drain the waste, drown the thrill. prisonic fairytale, do we rot? promise that I’ll make it out. decay, do the memories clot? will I be remembered? cries won’t be met without, another pill, a collection of leather. ordinary vanity of who that remains. it was only wishful thinking. apart of flesh and bones, a soul that sustains.

Paden Geddings

[fragment]

you are but a fragment a moment in time when you are nothing but a streetlight that i drive by past the place where our hands didn’t meet and your lips were an unforgiving line of tired goodbyes and half hearted replies

a mirrorball of memories when a moment in time you were everything the leaking rain on my parched skin where once it shined with a rosy hue of blushing petals set to flower in spring to a yellow traffic light flashing a flustered red as i stop and dim myself under your shadow

you are a reflective shard a sharpened end patricia c.

of a broken mirror in a moment where a shattered life was held together by an ever-lovely jewel whose shimmer ineptly mirrored your selfish desperation to be anything more than but a fragment in my life

[Phases of the moon]

Payton Woods

The moon comes out every night but a half-moon doesn’t. Half moons are special, different you could say, even if only half is missing. I have heard stories about things happening every half-moon. Just like me. A long time ago I was playing hopscotch outside when my friend said that night was going to be a half-moon. I stayed up till nine to watch and see the moon, then I heard sirens and that’s all I remember. I thought I was dreaming but I wasn’t, and I woke up to some surprising place with monkeys the size of ladybugs and ladybugs the size of birds. Little monkeys grabbed my leg. Where was I? I asked myself over and over. This place was surely not home but could have easily been a dream, I thought, trying to comfort myself. So I pinched myself and it hurt. I was awake. I felt almost no gravity, at least not like the earth’s gravitational pull. In the distance, I saw a little town. With lots of pretty lights and people bustling through what seemed to be a city. As I got closer and closer heading for the little town it kept getting smaller and smaller. I felt like I, too, was shrinking. The town was still a little down the road but I got close to a little house that felt like home. I knocked on the door. To a little girl who answered it. She seemed very generous. A little after her mom slowly came behind peeking her head out and pulling her daughter behind her. She grinned and said, “I wasn’t expecting you to be here so soon, especially not at this hour,” as if she was expecting me. She told me to come inside for a cup of tea. On the table was a nicely placed tea kettle with a plate full of little blueberry biscuits. I took a seat trying to understand what was happening. The little girl ran towards me with

her little stuffed frog. Which she carried everywhere. She came up and gave me a hug and said, “You’re the best sissy ever.” Her mom then said, “Oh honey, that’s sweet.” Me, her sister? I had never seen that girl in my whole life but yet I still felt comfortable around her. The mom tucked the little girl into bed and came and sat down at the tea-table with me. There was an awkward silence. Until she finally said something. She said, “I’m surprised you even showed up, I thought you would decline our invitation. I haven’t seen you in fourteen years, oh how you have grown.” Then she went on, “You see fourteen years ago you lived here happily with me on the moon, then our city went to war with a mean and feisty city who wanted war, they burned down houses and enslaved people. To protect you, I sent you in a pod to an Earth orphanage hoping one day on a halfmoon you would return. Our people from the moon can only come back from the earth every half-moon, but they must be awake. I thought I would never see you again so I adopted a little girl named Alice to raise. That’s why I was so surprised to see you,” She then burst into tears. I asked her if this was true and she said yes hugging me. I was finally home.

[him]

As night became day, he started to understand the truth. As the stars faded and the sun rose, it began to make sense. As the sky turned from black to orange, the pieces fell into place. As much as it hurt, he understood. Understood that It was him all along.

pip