Kendall Cooper

in support of Ukraine

i.

reach bone, reach drooling eyes
reach the sternums of streets that fail
to crack. reach life that caresses
the mourners, reach guns that fire
diagonal to the dead. reach missing and
missing and found, reach under
the black mattress of a miracle. reach
the wilting body. reach tattered wrists

ii.

reach shameless, reach vulnerable
and nude. reach bare arms

that cannot bear love. reach into
humanity without

looking and finding
the missing pieces. reach away,

then reach back. reach anyone
on the train of a breath

any delicate stare, any hurt
construction of a child.

iii.

reach send
reach those who fly
reach those who lift gravity
and souls to pass the time
reach brow
reach wrinkle and terrified hips
that shackle a body
reach blood that runs gray
reach mouth that runs straight
reach angel
reach divine
and dangerous mercy
reach bless
reach severely gentle!

reach on to those tender people
on the other side waiting
to never be called
reach them

iv.

with their hands
only full of open and empty. reach
out
to your children. reach out, just
enough
to hold them in your arms

 

Kendall Cooper is a rising high school senior based in Houston, Texas. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop and is a 2022 Adroit Journal Mentee. Kendall has won numerous Scholastic Awards for her poetry and was a semi-finalist for Houston Youth Poet Laureate. Currently, she works as a literary apprentice for Breakbread Magazine.

Imagine being born into a world that bites back
Thrown here with no stepping stones
The clatter of flag poles; the chatter of fallen leaves
—this is home and hell.
Cold carcasses carried in the arms of Small Town,
Puppeteering inert skin with heartstrings,
Collecting taxes or cemetery-addressed love letters or me.
Muffled chirps and benches left barren
Hooked on minority famine.
But these eulogies are not compulsory
Because sometimes escape is recovery
So as new-home warmth overwhelms
And the fiery frigidity subsides
We are finally granted a goodbye

 

Jaxon Farmer (he/him) is a seventeen-year old student from Ohio who values language as the vehicle for reflection and advocacy. This comes to fruition most often within the Speech & Debate sphere. He attempts to craft his works as a patchwork of the beautiful incongruity of identity.

Do you think we will grow old
In a way that doesn’t hurt
I feel I hold a hundred years
And am not an infant yet
My skin is stretched and then it folds
What are the church bells ringing for?
Will my eyes close and then go blind
Before I get used to the light?

 

Livia von Gossler is a seventeen-year-old high school student. She is currently living in British Columbia, Canada. A goal of hers is to study English at university.  Always interested in literature, she’s been writing poetry for years and participated in multiple poetry events. She loves poetry and how it can turn complex emotions into art. In writing she found way to cope and express her own sentiments.

Someday
I am going to be a kick-ass grandmother.

Just wait. I’ll have grown-up mojo over 9000
I’ll say whatever the hell I want to
Because someday
There won’t be anyone older to complain.

Someday I will tell all those awful stories about “flip phones”
and “BuzzFeed”
and “bluetooth”
and when I run out of memories about snail mail and VHS tapes and walking uphill to school
both ways
barefoot
in the snow
Because in the end I think there are some things that never change.

Someday I am going to be a middle-aged woman.
Wean teeny children into teenagers on the teddy bears of the future–

Someday I will be a new mother.
Meet my partner’s eyes over a knee-high ball of perfect and fall exhausted into an unmade bed
Place my hands over a rounded stomach and feel new life pulse inside of me
And get up to go to the bathroom one more time

but

Before that (I promise) I will be a college student
Throw off the mantle of my loving/hated parents and then reach backwards to lift it ill-fittingly
on
Squish the memories down when I pack my bags so they fit inside a standard carry-on
And find them flattened smooth like pressed flowers when the contents may have shifted during
flight

Well.
It’s early, still.
Mom always did say I jump into things;

I suppose that’s more than enough dreaming before dinner.

 

Jocelyn Olum is a writer, a student, and a circus performer. She grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, where she was awarded both Gold and Silver Keys from the Regional Scholastic Writing Awards for Poetry. Her work has been featured in Red Eft Review and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.

The bowl was left empty
though I knew you wanted something
that would tease your tongue the
Way you would tease me
when you wanted to see me smile through
a scowl. I could only find limes
So we sucked on them after
licking salt off one another’s
Hands, priming our tongues for
shots of tequila we poured
down our throats in the sweet
Burn of agave and mistreatment.
I wanted so badly to cry
but when I saw your face
Nose crunched, lips tight, eyes
Watering, I forgot why.

 

Giana is a writer of creative nonfiction, poetry, and short stories in Philadelphia. She is currently working towards a masters at Saint Joseph’s University. Her work has been published in Philadelphia Magazine.

Thirty years on & still summer nights settle into
shared breaths. The moonlight dancing on your lips,

each syllable of air pregnant with want. Within these
naked walls, we are holy & that means selfish

& that means I confess I like my body more
when you’re inside it. This moving metronome rhythm.

 These shipwrecked hands that found a home
holding yours. God, how we have whittled our lives

down to this: newspaper coffee. Feet massages
on the living room couch. Your pillowed touch

braiding me to sleep. There are nights too endless
with weary & you would harness me back to shore,

the flesh of your name percolating the tongue
like we are everywhere & tomorrow all at once.

 

Conan Tan (he/they) currently lives in Singapore and loves writing poems on grief, love, heartbreak and trauma. When he’s not writing, he’s probably curating Spotify playlists or rewatching The Good Place. Their poems have been published in, or are forthcoming at, SingPoWriMo and Eunoia Review.