Tanisha Bose

The alarm goes off
like it’s new,
like we haven’t been training for disaster
our whole lives.

We know how to run,
how to hide,
how to laugh through lockdowns
like it’s just another Tuesday.

The teachers hush our jokes,
but we are fourteen,
already fluent in irony.

We know where the exits are.
We know which desks
won’t stop a bullet.
We know
this is normal
and that’s the worst part.

 

Tanisha Bose is a teenage poet exploring identity, survival, and silence through raw, lyrical verse. Their work has been previously published in Blue Marble Review, Merion West etc.

After Ayrton Senna

here and now, i chant the only mantra i know,

i would cross seven seas behind you.

like a candle lit for a séance, the car starts.

i spin the world around in my hands.

reverse gear – in the mirrors, dreams refuse to meet my eyes.

i feel the engine oil in my ribs – it needs changing.

metal brother, hold me close – we are all that is left of each other.

through the downpour, i drive under the stent holding open the street.

there are raindrops on my cheek – the windshield wipers can’t wash them away.

if there’s magic in these pedals, let it spin the odometer back.

in the tunnel, going going going – i cross the conscious behind you.

but in the end, the light shows me

nothing ahead but road.

 

Aarushi Gupta is a nineteen-year-old from Bangalore, India. Her work has been recognized by Elan, Roanoke Review and the Lewis Center for the Arts. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers Studio. You can find her writing at aarushiwrites.com

I could fall a hundred times
if no one saw it.
Spill the whole bowl of effort on the floor
and laugh,
if no one was watching.

But with eyes?
I flinch before I even move.
I double-check certainty
until it’s a cage.

Maybe I’m not scared of getting it wrong
just scared of you
seeing me get it wrong.

Of the way silence stretches
after a wrong answer.
The pause.
The sideways glance.
The subtle note someone files under
“not that smart.”

Isn’t it strange?
How the sting isn’t from the fall
but from the imagined commentary?

Not the act,
but the audit.

Not failure,
but failure witnessed.

We don’t fear the mess.
We fear the mirrors.
(please clap)

 

Myra Arora is a high school senior from New Delhi who writes poetry in lowercase and lives life mostly in italics. While her primary work spans AI research, social entrepreneurship, and editorial leadership, poetry is her pause—her way of navigating the unspoken parts of being sixteen and hyper-aware. Her work aims to sit somewhere between vulnerability and observation, laced with introspection, dry humor, and a little digital-age existentialism.

Attached to the main house, but only accessible
by way of tsinelas-clad feet. First is the step from seamless white tile to
concrete, steep enough to stumble. I certainly do, despite the wooden
door frame. More than once. If I can manage two, three near-misses in less than
eight days, how much more Auntie May, Lolo Badong, all my mother’s
family who can truly call this house home? But this is
Guinobatan, town small enough for a guarantee that someone will
hear and catch your fall. Tread down, turn left, look up,
in wait lies the stairs: drippingly steep, tropical heat
kissing every inch of skin. After the peeling, off-white incline, the door
latch—untouched for seven years. The last time I passed by. Inside:
musty. The first word that wafts through my nostrils, like
nothing else in hyper-sanitized suburban America. Naturally, dust
overlays everything. Lolo Badong’s steel bookcase, hundreds of titles on
philosophy and religion and Filipino history. How I wish that but a
quarter of them could fit into my suitcase, a priceless inheritance for the
ride home. A murky-eyed Beanie Boo, sooty and sitting
silently. I apologize for the seven years of solitude but never take him home.
To my home. This, now, is his. According to my mother, this room is really
Uncle Padi’s. Padi for priest. Everyone calls him the humblest, most
virtuous person they know. I’ve christened him my living patron saint.
When his days of white t-shirts and plain sandals and
‘xtraordinary service are over, he’ll have only the room of his
youth to return to. As hallowed as this tower may be, the
zone of true peace lies on the balcony. Admittedly, it’s not quite
a tower’s grand lookout, more so one rooftop among many.
Between chiseled stone rails and the ceiling of our suite,
clotheslines sway softly, awaiting embroidered panties and skinny jeans to
dry. The ghosts of my mother and Lolo Badong linger in the
evening air. When she was the youngest daughter and he was her
father. Even the crumbs of their conversations haven’t lost their taste:
grades, God, the tangled threads that lie at a small town’s
heart. Or not. A decade later, she followed her sisters to the stars, hence why
I stand here today. Here: made in America, 24-hour flight to Manila,
jumping the meridian between tomorrow and today just to
kiss my lolo’s age-spotted hand, to light a candle at my
lola’s locked tomb. But I am a country divided, a house united unto
myself: my heart, too, haunts the tower suite. An archive, a lighthouse.
Never will we be too far to meet again.

 

Christine Novelero is a creative writing student at Kinder HSPVA in Houston, Texas. She is a Scholastic Writing Awards Gold Key winner. Her writings have been published in Scribere, The Weight Journal, Voice & Virtue, and others. Outside of writing, she is a chaser of sleep, a dancer at heart, sister to three cats, lover of soft things, an unwitting seeker of metaphor, and a passionate volunteer.

Ghosts roam the nearby international orange,
in view of precious plots, this land-
not mine, not anyone’s you know.

A rich mound of people who say:
“Well, this has to be the most beautiful city in the world!”
The hunched overs pushed so far from here
they lie like zombies in the place we govern.
Hills on hills of green lush
federally protected eye candy.
Don’t let them fool ya-
not baby ruth or twix or sour patch,
but a stash of trimmed hedges, clean edges.
Red and Blue shine as
Safeway carts and blankets
park under pine.
Disturbing the peace.
Our piece.

San Francisco made density test.
A Mr. Gerry chemistry experiment.
An Aunt Mandy salad dressing in summertime.
Cream rises to the top, say something

One percenters here, hunched overs there
Refuse to blend, numb, heels dug in, eyes fogged over,
atop the rich-mound in the Richmond.

 

Finn is 17, the youngest of four, and lives in San Francisco. He spends a lot of time playing basketball, but writing, mostly poems and short stories, has always been where he really figure things out. His favorite book is A Visit from the Goon Squad because it captures how messy and layered life can be. When he is not on the court or writing, he is usually at the beach with his dog or out sailing, trying to catch a quiet moment.

Dadi says there are two kinds of thirst:
the one that leads horses to river, the one
that leads girls to marriage. Each monsoon,
she teaches me to read prophecies in rainfall—
how water, like family, knows a thousand ways
to enter a body uninvited. In her stories,
every daughter becomes a well where mothers
drown their own reflections. Every daughter
learns to swallow oceans without showing salt
on her tongue. Last night, I dreamed Dadi’s
wedding bed turned to river, her body dissolving
into all the tears she never allowed herself.
She wore silence like a second skeleton,
rattling beneath her sari’s silk. Even now,
decades after her burning, I find scattered bones
of her unlived life: a cinema ticket stub,
half-written love letter, English primer
with penciled dreams in margins. Amma
says women in our family are born with gills—
not for survival, but for knowing how
to breathe through drowning. At night,
I press my ear to her door, count rhythms
of her midnight gasping: each breath
a small resurrection, each exhale heavy
with the weight of swallowed stories.
In morning light, we rebuild ourselves
from water damage: steam rising from chai
like ghosts of almost-spoken truths,
while Amma teaches me to read weather
in a husband’s hands, in the barometric
pressure of his moods. Some nights I wake
to find her filling mason jars with rain,
preserving storms like family recipes.
Says every daughter needs an ocean
of her own. Says thirst is another word
for learning to drink your own drowning.

 

ANUJ JAIN is a poet and community organizer from the San Francisco Bay Area whose work explores the intersection of cultural identity and linguistic transformation. Growing up in an immigrant household, he witnessed language’s power in both presence and absence. His poetry navigates the space between Mother Tongue and English, embracing contradiction rather than forcing simple answers to complex questions. When not leading educational initiatives and research for systematic change, Anuj can be found on tennis courts or scribbling verses on the backs of research papers, searching for beauty in the gray areas that science alone can’t capture.