Literary Journal for Young Writers
| Dante de Jong is a fifteen year-old writer and photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. She enjoys scribbling nonsensical lines of verse in her notebook, and wandering around at night looking for the perfect scene to photograph. |
Adedeji John is a young artist whose work is fueled from the soul. He has participated in many exhibitions and his style relays the message of human nature, emotions and its notions. He dives into many mediums as oil, ball points, and water colors.
Jennifer Wan is a young artist and writer from Maryland. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Bethesda Urban Partnership. In her free time, she likes to play the violin, swim and listen to music.
It has been the year of tests,
the year of my soul’s partial death,
the year that my guardian angel decided
to let go of my hand.
I ripped through the atmosphere for months,
trying to grab the clouds and planes above.
Each time I’d try to save myself, though,
they’d slip from my grasp.
So I continued to fall
like the first raindrop of a downpour,
crying for a parachute, screaming for someone to save me
from the cold pavement below.
No one heard me scream except the air.
No one heard me weep except me.
All I could do was brace for impact,
and pray to God that I would learn to fly
before I hit the ground.
I learned.
I scraped my feathers against the pavement,
but I learned.
Samantha Szumloz is a junior Writing Arts major minoring in creative writing at Rowan University. Her work has been featured in publications such as Moria, Woodbury University’s national literary magazine, and R U Joking?, Rowan’s comedy publication. She is from Hamilton Township, New Jersey.
Sometimes I think about how
I love you even in my dreams.
One night, I imagined we were
spies, traveling to a mansion in
a bathtub instead of car, and you
pressed my back against the cold
tile when you kissed me. But, a
different night, the train you rode
slewed off its tracks into a ravine
while I watched through the glass
windows of a diner. I will never
forget how I chewed my tongue
while I looked for your body in the
rocks and twisted metal. For hours
I convinced myself you were alive;
only when I woke up were you dead.
Those four minutes—when writing
your eulogy was more impossible
than any traveling bathtub and my
bedsheets were a concrete casket—
that was the nightmare. But then you
told me good morning, and I was
back in my dreams. Funny how my
mind taught me what losing you feels
like, so I will never let myself wake up
against anything but our cold tiles.
Jenna Mather is a graduate of the University of Iowa, where she studied English and creative writing. With her poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, she tries to untangle the complexities of love, womanhood, and the writing life. On any given day, you can find her in a coffee shop—or online at @_jennamather and jennamather.com.
My essay originally aimed to reflect the monotony and disconnection felt during COVID-19, particularly in the later stages of quarantine. During this time, while traditional structures like school dissolved into recorded lessons and solitary note-taking, it felt like life was becoming more routine and cyclical. And while humanity as a whole was more connected than ever through technology, I felt incredibly disconnected from the people I actually cared about. Interactions with my parents were distant and perfunctory. The virtual enjoyment of others’ lives via my phone became a more palatable escape than engaging in my own reality. The ever-present mental lethargy I experienced fascinated me. I had not previously understood it was possible to feel so profoundly empty.
When I heavily revised the story in April, it was during spring break. Although quarantine had been over for over a year at that point, I felt the mental exhaustion, sense of purposelessness, and reliance on instant technological gratification roaring to the surface as soon as the stress and structure of school ended. While I hated the academic pressure, being without it made me listless and apathetic. It was a feeling that resonated with many of my classmates, inspiring me to dig this story up and polish it. I didn’t intend it to be a commentary on modern technology, but I did want to showcase my reliance on it for any sort of satisfaction. Despite the initial inspiration of the story being outdated, I thought the story could still reflect the lethargy, disconnection, and desire for purpose present in modern-day life.
641 HOURS: DAYBREAK
Your pillow has fallen to the ground.
Action: shuffle your feet around on the floor, to and fro, like a faulty metal detector, before your foot connects. Pillow acquired. It is sandwiched between your legs and levitated back onto the bed, beep beep beep, typical claw machine. There is now a dust bunny on the bed.
With bleary eyes, you can make out a dash of orange beyond the window. And it’s interesting, that orange, and you could get up now to examine it some more, like how poets would, in these hidden moments, except there is a pillow cool on your face, and a dust bunny on the bed you want to try and kick off, and time is slipping away, like quicksand in your hands, and maybe there’s something about the orange beyond the window—
1000 HOURS: MUD
Your eyes are sticky.
So is your mouth, for that matter. And your hair. You swore you showered the night before.
You reach for your phone. You look at the time and fail to compute. Your mind cycles through a barely rendered script until you’re almost on the brink of sleep once more—
The door opens. Your mother walks into the room, and she says something about going to work today, for the first time in a while, as long as she covers her face and sits far apart, and isn’t that exciting? You nod, you think, or make some sort of noise, so she leaves. You lay on the bed, sticking to the pillow. There is a wandering sock pressing against your hip. She comes back, sometime later, and tells you that breakfast is getting cold. She kisses you on the cheek. Her mouth smells like coffee.
The breakfast is cold when you reach it. The bread is dry in your mouth. You eat it slowly, a podcast crackling laughter in the background.
1200 HOURS: QUICKSAND
You are at your desk. There is work, in front of you, presumably. For the life of you, you’re not sure what that work is. There is a phone, and it is in your hands, and you are not sure how long it’s been there. You think you should get lunch soon. You think you should go outside and exercise.
There is a phone in front of you. Time drifts.
1300 HOURS: VENTURE
You put on a sweater and you keep your pajamas on and you wear sandals that are a little too big. It’s cold outside. There is a podcast crackling laughter in your ears. You feel your breath circle back like a whirlwind in your mouth as you make your order and hand in your coins and get coins back that smell like copper-blood until you wash your hands turning them pink and raw.
You’re back in the living room. You can’t find any salad in the fridge. Cooking anything feels like moving a mountain, at this moment. You grab a box of orange juice and hope it counts as a fruit and hope a fruit counts as a vegetable.
1500 HOURS: STATUS QUO
You are back on the bed. Food sits heavy in your stomach. There is a phone in front of you. Time drifts.
1700 HOURS: ESSAI
You make a list. Arrogant. Pretentious. Insecure. Annoying. Lazy.
The list is crumpled and tossed in the bin.
You pull up a star chart and write down adjectives. Imaginative, supportive, intuitive. Your mind is heavy. There is a headache pressing against your temple. You want to lie down on the bed.
You make another list. Nice. Smart. Funny?
This list, too, lands in the bin.
Somewhere, objectively, you are aware you are a Person. A Person who Does Things and Knows Themself. You look at the first list once more and then inside yourself.
How are you feeling? Okay. Pleasant. Fine?
That’s not quite right. You look harder. You find you truly are fine, except perhaps pleasant isn’t the right word. An unpleasant fine, then. You’re feeling scooped out, yes, that’s a good metaphor, and filled up with something. Oobleck.
For a moment, you almost miss the worry. The pressing anxiety and overwhelming irrationality and harsh static that at least made you move. Then you shake yourself. The worry hurt, you remember, and it’s jinxing it now to even almost miss it.
You flop down on the bed. You don’t usually have these thoughts at 5pm, but these days, there’s little to no difference between three in the morning and five in the afternoon.
Time passes.
1900 HOURS: SHARP
Mom returns and she doesn’t say much. She wants to watch a cooking show and you want to show her a movie-that’s-coming-out-on-streaming-only-because-the-animators-need-the-support and she tells you to not move and watch the fucking cooking show. You’re angry, and annoyed, but secretly, it’s the most alive you’ve felt in a long time.
2100 HOURS: MOVEMENT
You take a shower and moisturise your hair. It’s the most productive you’ve been all day.
2200 HOURS: RETURN
You try to Do Things again. You type two paragraphs of an essay. Your words sputter out like an old car wheezing its final few miles. You type but the words don’t start up again.
ZERO HOUR
There is a phone in your hands. A pillow is cool against your cheek and your nose. The dust bunnies are gone. Outside, a motorcycle screeches. Outside, the wind is whistling. If you try hard enough, you could make out a voice beyond the window. And you wonder if you could listen in, like you used to when you were a child, like the writers do sometimes, in these quiet private moments. But there is a phone in your hands, and your eyes are a moth drawn to the light, and the moment slips away, quicksand in your hands.
Davina Jou is a high school student in Taiwan. They enjoy playing DnD, listening to podcasts, and talking to their cactus. Their works can be found on pen-and-palette.com.