Sara Medwin

My mother tells me her mother was a refugee,
youth rooted in the Korean divide.
She was plucked, an unripe persimmon still green with potential.

When I stare, I fall into wrinkles—she shifts to hide her smile
peony-plump faces were far too frivolous a good for children of war, already yoked—
war-bred dogs jumping at their backs.

Downstream journeys and stolen 김치, the sun rose and my mother was born
in a Korea-minus-its-other-half. She didn’t want to be plucked,
so she ripened in the grip of repentance and morphine, danced under a tree—
and fled on the undertow of a piano.

Now my last name is Medwin, my eyes are not quite crescent moons.
My father has pupils scarred by a premature birth; Jewish hair curled to the tune of
a 21st Century Schizoid Man. Everything my mother’s mother
wanted him not to be.

In this land of unbridled independents, I see children plucked from cookie-cutter homes,
sutured skin keeping them alive. Petals snatched from dahlia unsuspecting.
I roam with imposters spiraling blood on Chanel bags, taste old money
spliced with a curious blue.

엄마, did you ever cry to your mother like this?
                        will it take playing possum and swimming on seeds of strange fruit
                        to stay alive?

I’m untouched for now—I can indulge in child’s play:
he loves me, he loves me not, without finding withered remains
staining the bottoms of my pretty pink shoes.

I can tattoo the latest fad into my aura, bathe in sweet sound that heals. In dreams of a stationary existence, I’m free from three-headed want, from
plated-peeling wealth. I bloom—the proof of
dahlia stretching to kiss the moon.

Sara Medwin is a sixteen-year-old poet from Maryland. She enjoys writing journalistically and has contributed to the news source Maryland Matters, but she’s a poet at heart. She firmly believes social media cleanses are the best thing since sliced bread and has an affinity for long, leisurely walks.

how can i pull a kind of reckless
reminiscence from the fish market

in town—on sunday i go alone.
the gardenias are unwatered

upon my return, the chamomile
unsteeped, toppling odds one over

another over another, but i can
only wring the salt from my sundress

and fill my mouth with brine. i scribble
on soiled parchment—to my husband—

but he will not be home until the ink
bleeds dry. the fish eyes are seething

blind so i sever sinew from bone,
bone carved of alabaster, simmered

and made into stew for a blind man’s
dinner. he will return riding the coattails

of a beer-battered high with not even
counterfeit love to give. i rock

in an armchair and think of this love,
cut from the lining of a singed oyster

shell, this love, wasted. before the
decades drowned themselves

in kerosene, i encountered a man at the
fish market on a sunday who gave

to me a spiraling romance in the ashes.
now, i tear the soft flesh of an apricot

naked from its pit and suck its nectar
from my gaping wounds—do you miss

me as much as i miss you? stranger—
you should see the acropolis i built

for you in my dreams. we are more
and more than this, you said. you

promised me more than a half-baked
existence so where are you now? now,

i lay a gallery of scraps on the beaten
cobblestone and wait for the coyotes

to feast at dusk. they say if the fever
does not kill you the loneliness will.

they say it is easier to play pretend. and
it is not until i have taped cellophane

ghosts to the sills and hung the linen
to dry that i recall—the man from the

fish market i married, but look what
has become of us now. a stranger

now. look—the tides are ever in flux,
shifting. look—i can no longer water

the roots of my saltwater fantasy.
look—how can i con serendipity?

pray that this life—clean, scale, gut—
is only a prototype for the next one.

Katie Tian is a fifteen-year-old writer from New York and a student at Jericho High School. She has been recognized nationally by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her work. She hopes to share her visions with a larger community through her poetry and prose.

it is not mere happenstance
that, so often now,
people walk halfway
across parking lots,
into stores, banks,
post offices, cafes,
before turning back,
having forgotten
their masks,
essential
as air we breathe
now.

are we forever
to go backwards,
into the past,
retracing steps,
trying to remember,
grasping at air,
striving to savor
every breath taken,
albeit through a filter,
when our eyes look ahead,
hearts leading us
forward?

more doors have opened
in these days after
the fact,
but it is like we are still
inside,
looking out,
wondering when
the road won’t bend,
splitting halfway,
branching in a new direction.
but if we waited for that,
we’d be waiting forever,
because, always, there is something
new, as change would will it,
all that remains
is that heart that stays the course,
leading us forward,
no matter how much
these days are different.

Kathryn Sadakierski is a twenty-one-year-old writer from Massachusetts whose work has appeared in Capsule Stories, Poetically Magazine, The Voices Project, and elsewhere. She collects vinyl records, vintage books, and memories, which inspire her art.