Aanya Goenka

The water beckons with its siren call,
An invitation to escape it all.
My limbs reach out, eager to explore,
As I dive in and begin to soar.

The cool embrace of liquid blue,
An endless world that feels brand new.
My strokes are strong, my breath is deep,
As I glide through the water with a graceful sweep.

There’s something magical about this sport,
Freedom and release of every thought.
I lose myself in the rhythm and flow,
And let the water’s current take control.

With every lap, I feel alive,
A sense of joy that I can’t describe.
So here I’ll stay, in this watery realm,
Forever captured by swimming’s spell.

 

 

Aanya an eighth grader at the Edgemont Jr/Sr  High School. She loves to play sports and is on the Edgemont varsity swim team. In her free time she  loves to read, draw, play the piano, and write poetry/stories, and hang out with friends and family.

 

In this poem, I do not want to hide my country’s failure between metaphors.
I will try not to robe the dirt off my people’s skin.
I no longer want to sing prayers into a dead thing.
You see, my country is no haven.
The gods have languaged their lips into ” Let there be night here.”
And our tongues have become too heavy to chant songs or offer “Amens.”

Beneath my sister’s neck, scars have sewn themselves into a portrait.
In my dream, my  country rolls away with the night, into emptiness.
The next day, we became living things.

 

 

Sa’ada Isa Yahaya is a fifteen year old Nigerian teenage author, poet and a spoken word artist. She hails from Okene Local Government Area of Kogi State. She is a proud member of the Hilltop Creative Art Foundation and a student of Jewel Model Secondary School Kubwa, Abuja. She is a second runner up for the AS ABUGI National Prize for Short Story and for the 2023 National Creative Writing Competition for Secondary Schools (Poetry Category).Her poem “Nothing beautiful lasts forever” came second in the Creators of Justice Literary Award 2023 ( Youth Category). She has her works forthcoming or have appeared in Kalahari review, Stripes Little Magazine, World Voices Magazine, Eboquills, Synchronized Chaos and elsewhere.

 

If anything. If light is another / way to meet your
body, now / understand the thinning of it
everywhere else. I suppose / I am in the most /
beautiful era of becoming / sacred: my palms
gashed / from my body, prayer / still seared on my
teeth only / for its holy cloth of language. If we /
were anything at all, you must understand: / I am
terrified and so / fevered with sorrow. The slight /
shadow of this silent, small / boat a mouthed
desire for something / past capable breath. And
the water: a flat chest of blue wall. / I wave this
orchestral minor into the / dark. Suppose you
lived. /

 

 

Stephanie Fuentes is a Mexican-American poet and writer from New York City. Her work is published/forthcoming in Columbia Quarto Magazine, Breakbread Magazine, Eunoia Review, and more. She attends Barnard College of Columbia University, where she is a Staff Editor at 4×4 Magazine.

i. wake in the umbra. five things i can see. my soul, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood floor. the blue and green network of a dragonfly’s wing feeding my pulse. coffee mug—hosting a housewarming for the next brain-eating bacteria floating on the surface. drawing of myself (why did i draw my head so large?) thoughts disclosed in a bubble: TRUST THE PROCESS. google search: does korea do skull reduction surgeries?

ii. insides are TV static. grab the first face i see in the mirror; defrost the muscles. double cleanse. crack an egg. the yolk is so perfectly circular and orange, i suddenly think about the sun god Helios, and how the myths have survived in my kitchen. dishes in the sink quiver for attention—ceramic indignance; i eat my egg on a napkin. i beg for my volta, the dash that will spin me on my axis. diffuse me with soft light, drink the blood, gain a messiah.

iii. step, step out. kool-aid sky sears my retinas. feeling like a skinned knee, white spots perform a ritualistic dance in circles across my vision. at the park, there is a girl who mistakes me for her mother, though i am much too young. is it my crescent moon eyes or the weariness pressed into my face that confuses her? raw and uncertain like the first day of school. my heart makes tentative moves—a rare moth pinned to a collector’s wall. flutter and flap. and then! then, wash, rinse, repeat.

 

 

Haley Marks is an English major at West Valley College from the Bay Area, California.

six, and all hard bones: chin jutting like a ship’s prow,
determined to go out dawn-treading – otherwise,
all unruly curls. my mother said it was a crown, a halo;
I was no angel yet, though.
sure, we nearly never made it to seven,
me and my clawed, hungry hands – she was a goblin girl,
a gremlin girl, giggling with the garden snails, chewing up stories
like corner-shop sweeties – never content to just have
sickness between my ears, I packed a thousand books
beneath the roof of my skull. and I never went near
heaven, no –
I stayed digging down in the mud
till six turned seven.

 

 

Megan studied English at Oxford University, and is now moving on to a Masters in Creative Writing. She likes fairytales, fraught family dynamics, and unreliable narration; she does not like Twitter, but can be found @meginageorge. Her published work is all available at https://meganspublished.tumblr.com.

All the girls in your city have a dog,
have something to ghost their
loneliness. You plant a rose by the
sea but it grows into a flood. No one
knows that water is an unforgiving
god. No one sees your hand holding
an apple bob, slipping into the gown
your mother died in. The bulbs are
blinking and the night flies are
gathering for the moon’s funeral but
tonight, you have run out of candy
the way you run out of childhood.
The star from the yard looks like a
bone. A boy said the dead are
coming to read a poem.

 

Born on a Friday in December, Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a young Nigerian poet whose work has been featured in The West Trade Review, The Shore, Agbowo and elsewhere. She is a nyctophobic gathering experience in Law in the Premier University of Ibadan.