Connie Cai

My friends and I live
in old houses. Old houses with peeling rooftops

and in the summer, we sit on them
after dark. Sunburns shrivel and fall away in the wind. We pass 

around a travel-sized bottle
of aloe vera. Our feet kicking up black bits of asphalt

—sometimes whole shingles slide down
into the side yard, into the garden, the driveway, 

the back patio. We used to stargaze, but the sky
is so polluted now. My friends and I live in old houses 

and none of the doors lock. The paint
is chipped. Stairs creak, voices drift through hollow walls 

and warmth is not what it used to be—
we were sitting on the roof when the house on Halstead 

burned. Like a bruised peach or a funeral.
It was raining but the fire didn’t care. When it rains we sit 

in our basements. Some of them are refurbished
but we don’t like those. They’re too mundane. Beige rugs 

and our fathers’ ellipticals in the corner. We like
basements with pipes unveiled, with shaking machines

and a garage that smells like pennies and soil
and sawdust. We like old houses with ancient backyards

with well pumps and birdbaths. Yellow tulips. We burn
old furniture in an old fire pit, watch aluminum handles melt 

into the grass. The house on Halstead had crown
molding and a knocker shaped like a lion that melted and left 

a puddle on the owners’ welcome rug. Home
SWEET Home. Old houses. Old gimmicks. Dry humor

makes dry kindling, and the wood burns
like my skin. Like my friends’ skin. Red, angry, in the dark

ash flies away with the breeze. We all smelled
the smoke, my friends and I. And we remembered that old houses 

burn quickly. That wood cracks and flames spread
and that the hallways are much too narrow for our brackish bodies.

 

 

Samantha Haviland is a high school senior at Interlochen Arts Academy. Their work has been published in the Interlochen Review and recognized nationally by Scholastic.

i am trying to hold you and i delicately.

you — woven like a spider’s web in between
my ribs, crisscrossed and haunting.
you knit together the space of my
diaphragm, so my heart never outgrows
the thread-bare chapel it lives in.

i — i test the word “gentle” in my mouth,
gentle, gentle, gentle. how it feels, how it tastes.
i ponder it. my body, still cradling the glass drops
that fell when the sky shattered. i still remember
your hand brushing mine. when the mind was
suddenly no longer cruel to the body.

i hold us with care, a deliberateness i didn’t have before,
this time my gloves are laced with impartiality.

i still hold us with reverie, this time like an
archeologist. i hold us up to the light.

 

Aamina Mughal is a young writer from Seattle where she serves on the Museum of Pop Culture’s Youth Advisory Board. She writes for TeenTix, and her work can be found on the TeenTix blog and on the Encore Spotlight. Her writing tends to pertain to identity, the intangible, and things like race and sexuality. In particular, how those intangible ideas interact with the tangible parts of identity like geography and family. When she’s not writing she can be found listening to new wave, listening to Taylor Swift, or binge-reading queer novels.

(who braved the brunt
for the both of us)
(who, stilted or stunted,
is still alive at twenty-five)
(who came out cord-caught
& kicking, miracle boy,
who came out singing Sinatra,
came out singing
Came Out Swinging,
who came out
tender as a bruise,
who bruises so easily,
like seriously, my tender-blooded
Von Willebrand brother,
King of the Block-
buster summer)
(who, in second grade, was shamed
for having nails painted flame—
who instead of going home,
& bathing in acetone,
inspired boys to do the same,
to steal their mother’s polish
& paint, a protest in each shade
of pink, gold, green, blue)
(you, who protected me
from the torment of elementary,
who found me sobbing by the swing sets
& said, half-threat,
you’d hit the heels of
my bully with the sharp edge
of your Razor scooter, you,
who taught me tough skin,
never tormented again,
you, who still holds my hiccups with
the softest snarl, you)
(big brother, who cries beside me
at the Tigers Jaw concert, whole
decade later, whose life
was saved by songs
shouted in the shower,
shouted shrouded
in sweat, shouted silent
in the tourmaline night,
big brother, who gave me lyrics
like heirlooms for when the hurt hums
like heartbeats, like blue prints
of an architectured ocean
you tread & survived
—so do it,
I dare you,
I triple dog dare
you, swim up straight
& admit that you’re special.

 

Mila Cuda is the former Youth Poet Laureate of the West Coast. Her work has been featured on Button Poetry, Teen Vogue, Rookie, and PBS. She is the lead poetry editor of the feature film Summertime (dir. Carlos Lopez Estrada), which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Mila is a caffeine-sensitive lesbian from Los Angeles with a sheer enthusiasm for spiders.

I need a smoke, I say,
in my pajama pants,
gray zombie flesh exposed
by a hole in the inner thigh.
With bone-crackling fingers
I slip on my fleece-lined winter boots,
let untied laces writhe against my movement,
host-less horsehair worms eager to bore through exoskeleton,
for knot-tying and mind control. My body passes
through the front door, like vapor, like smog,
I fold my knees over a front-stoop step.
The wind bites blood back into my cheeks. I check my pulse,
a muted shiver under onionskin. I reach for a lighter and a pack
but when my hand hits the silk of an empty pocket,
I remember,
with a flickering bedsheet shock,
that I’ve never smoked a cigarette,
never, not once in my life.
A red light turns green and with a rush of traffic
I decide to press on anyway,
cigarette-less.
I hold the gap between my first and middle finger,
press the negative space to lava-rock lips,
long drag.
Black soot burns down my throat, drips
into my lungs like candle wax, they bloat three sizes with heat.
I blow my clouds at passersby,
but they are busy blowing their own, dodging the acid rain.
The nicotine burrows into the pink-meat folds of my brain,
sends a rosy glow through my body like a pulsing cartoon heart.
I flash back and forth between
monster and human-again.
I sit and smoke until the sky breaks open and bleeds,
until my last neighbor tumbles over,
the last car sinks into the concrete,
the last building crumbles into ash,
rejoins the dead night mist.
I grind the remains
of my ghost-cigarette into the sidewalk
with a twisted ballerina toe
before turning inside,
half-satisfied,
half-human,
only half-pretending.

 

Emma Lagno is a writer from upstate New York. She currently studies the literature and religions of the ancient Mediterranean at Harvard Divinity School.

 

a week after you died i dreamed
that you and grandpa were
having a
tea party in heaven. sitting
sanctimoniously on a rose-pink cloud,
you gossiped
about those mundane affairs you witnessed
from up in your living room in the sky.
your masculine pinkies were lifted in the
air, making
a funny juxtaposition with your dainty blue china cups.

i wrote an email to you about it.
i detailed the precise economy of my dream because i
wanted to preserve your flesh. i wanted you indelibly
material, just far away. i know you thought you
were going to purgatory, but of course i hated
that notion. i used to imagine you were off
on a business trip instead. maybe your flight was delayed.
i was never good at math but it comforted me to quantify
you, ten fingers, ten toes. to believe you existed in
the same form. that you could hear me talking to
you. i had only to speak louder, toss my words up
and watch their contrails trace the space
between us.

then the negative space
of your absence was replaced by the
positive space occupied by violets
growing out of
your ten fingers, ten toes. decomposing, you
spread under the earth, transmogrifying into the
stuff of everything that is, yet you disappeared
so neatly. (poof).
i wanted to dig you up, prop your slender
frame in the passenger seat of the minivan.
sit you at
the head of the dining room table or on the
yellow couch, tenderly place kierkegaard or kant
in your lap. how our world contracted when you
left. an empty chair. a too-big king bed.

did you die because you were
too unadulterated a self to stay?
whether or not you remain,
it must be heaven where you
are. the purgatory is in the empty space
that throbs in the ellipses
of each inadequate clause i
write to you in emails you’ll
never read.

 

 

Frances Brogan is a junior in high school and an avid writer. She’s passionate about literature, arguing, and social justice.