Michael Adebiyi

Devote yourself to knitting or gardening.
Lock the door. Extinguish all light

and rehearse hibernation. Make a list
of everyone you’ve ever loved. Beg

for answers. Count all the seeds
on a strawberry, all the threads

in a sweater, all the ways bodies forgive.
Collect yourself, then step outside

into the cold gasping of springtime
and trace the contrails, their geometry

on the margin of world, a diagram
of purpose. Ask for nothing

but tomorrow, again.
Give up everything else. Then keep going.

 

Davin Faris is a climate organizer, writer, and student at St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Maryland. His writing has been featured by the New York Times, Patagonia Magazine, Slingshot Collective, Livina Press, Ink & Marrow, and others. He is a submission reader for ONLY POEMS.

Night is a cloudless canopy,
a shy moon hesitating above the peak.
Your phone light spills white on the cow path,
a radiant brink ahead
Swaying with purple needlegrass,
your black cast wrapped around your hobbling foot.

The chirpy doctor told you “four weeks”
until you could don your half-torn leather glove.
“What about my plan?” you asked,
beating balls, sweating your way to Division One.
Now, you’re an alien, wobbling up a foreign hill,
not chasing the silver golf ball, not chasing anything.
You’re without your coconut sunscreen, your strawberry electrolytes,
without your golf bag heavy around your shoulders—
Who are you?

You stand on the rocky outcropping,
hovering above the clover-green horizon,
where pink watercolor is smeared below a bright balloon.
The poppied terrain ahead is dotted with clusters of
rhinestone lights tucked into the kneaded hills.

You imagine the galaxy beyond, clusters of colorful marbles,
balls of sparking energy circling and colliding, each farther than the last—
The dark indifferent closet expands to infinity, ripping through the void—
and you briefly fear the crushing grip of the cosmos.

But maybe someone out there is looking back,
like you, feeling significantly insignificant,
a speck in the universe, wandering on a floating rock.
But it’s not all lost. It’s your duty to navigate the fairway ahead
and find your place among the stars.

 

Nathan Lee lives in San Ramon, California and is currently attending Dougherty Valley High School.

what else to start fires with? I’ve been busy
dropping every other word to echo your accent.
busy looking down at the river instead
of out. Sometimes I forget
that you can have turtles, too. brushfires,
orange skies. Railroads and love confessions
and metaphors.

Later, I ask you why we remember the rain
when we hadn’t seen it. I guess I have been running
guess I only care for the awnings shielding me
from it. you good? We stayed in the back that night.

what else? I’ve been brushstroke-oriented
since I met you. You grin in every shade of blue. Photos
with you in it that blur your face. I hold down,
your laugh shades the background all sorts of hues.
What else? your voice lilts, lights. Like a name
can be an apocalypse. A figure swooping bluebird-like
hill-landing. I should’ve known you were serious
because you kept holding the flash and didn’t once ask us
to take one of you in return. we have so little time. you hold affection
in tangerine segments, tell me you understand the metaphors.
the humidity. breath in your throat. I move gently,
hazy, wear complementary colors.

 

Noralee Zwick is a student and poet based in the Bay Area, California. A California Arts Scholar and Iowa Young Writers Studio alum, their work can be found in Aster Lit, Prairie Home Magazine, and Polyphony Lit, among others.

My body is my problem, my greatest joy,
My torment, my project, my most prized possession.
Something I fight with, withholding it fuel- leaving the tank
Empty and sputtering for oil.

I love it, I jeer at it, I starve it- let my ribs
Poke through and
Fat melt through my skin and out of me,
Like was through cloth.

Sometimes I cherish it, show it off as if I were
A delicate chandelier,
Rosy glass and sweet, soft light.
Sometimes I let it be seen by hungry eyes, then snatch it
Away.

My body, my prop,
My eternal companion.

 

Chloe Parekh is a sophomore at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, New York. Last summer she attended Bard College Young Writer’s Workshop and the Interlochen Intensive Novel Writing Program. During Summer 2023, she attended Oxford Summer Courses in Philosophy. She is a recipient of Scholastic Art & Writing ’25 Gold and Silver Keys in both Poetry and Painting. Her poetry has appeared in Apprentice Writer (Spring ’25), the Young Writer’s Anthology (Boston, Spring ’24), American High School Poets ’24, and Poetic Power: A Celebration of Poets ’24. Her poem ‘Summertimes’ won the ‘Once Upon a Dream’ Award from Young Writers USA. She will attend The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop this summer and the Polyphony Lit Summer Editing Apprenticeship. When not writing poetry, she enjoys spending time with friends, taking long walks and exploring her surroundings and drawing at home in Brooklyn.

I am a body of many seasons.
Today, I am pliant, poured like honey
into the sun’s open jaw,
armpits sugared with sweat,
legs shaved raw and pink,
the wind kissing me greedy, relentless.

Tomorrow, I will be stiff.
The air will whisper cardigan, whisper retreat,
and I will listen. I will shrink into myself,
womb heavy with the secret ache of womanhood,
spine curving like a sickle moon.

Now a girl beside me at the museum
renders an ichthyosaurus, bone by bone,
a ghost inside the machine, vertebrae flickering into form.
I watch its body unearth itself from code and light
and think — how sure it must be,
to exist only in hindsight.

On the way back, She’s Always a Woman
spills through my headphones, and suddenly—autumn
burnt leaves curling through a cracked window,

though spring is still impossible, undecided
its face a different shape each morning;
one foot in the Triassic, one in the thawing future.

I walk past the upper campus brick houses,
their chimneys raised like fists against the wind,
and feel myself unstitching from time,
like the hem of a too-worn shawl,
so much the way my body is not the body it was yesterday,
my skin stretching, swelling—
woman today, something else tomorrow.

Maybe the season will settle before I do.
Maybe neither of us were meant to.

 

Indiana Plant is a freshman and Eccles Scholar at the University of Utah, where she is studying applied economics and anthropology. Her poetry has been published by The Palouse Review, Sink Hollow, Live Poets Society of New Jersey, Blue Marble Review (hi again!), and Scripto Literary Magazine. She has received an Honorable Mention in the Penguin Random House U.S. Creative Writing Awards.