Poetry

 

The air, harsh with dust, looks for a throat to snag behind the front door. The particle board cabinet has a vacuum cleaner hiding in it like a ghost, its doors gently swaying back and forth on their hinges.

The red carpet is peeling, lightly touched by sunset’s cool fingertips and pressed down by years of heavy footsteps. Dust bunnies in the corners blow in a draft; lamps sit on the floor like abandoned obelisks.

 

She won’t understand

the parts of her old age she

can’t handle feeling.

 

One should be afraid of stepping on the scalding, rusted heating vents or knocking over her eclectic art collection: triangles indented into turquoise clay, watercolors of sharp toothed faces in the moon, and pictures of spiraling white houses that look like desert apparitions.

Her sheet music, the corners of the pages yellow and soft, still sits on the piano. The giant windows above the couch are smudged where the greasy dog pressed his nose as he whined to go outside.

 

We’re helpless with her;

we watch each room’s warm lightbulbs

burn out their bright hearts.

 

She has cardboard shoeboxes of glass slides with tiny pictures of icons and saints, their eyes asking everything of us. It would take days to go through and years to learn how to throw away. She left an apple, now rotten, on the stained kitchen table, with her reading glasses, black diary, and ripped envelopes.

 

Single pane windows

out of place; will her house look

like this when she’s gone?

 

Vera Caldwell is a sophomore at Houston’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Along with writing, she plays the guitar and composes songs in her band Nobody’s Daughter. Some of her favorite writers include Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, Patti Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Fleur Jaeggy.

Fifteen candles and six pairs of cracked slack lips sent smoke through song and sky. The neighborhood boys swapped pencils for cigarettes and grew fast, hard, and knotted—like trees. Root beer floats on Saturdays now sloppy Smirnoff and strobing streets. No more body of Christ on Sundays, amen, just steaming Stiiizys and girls passed out on the beach.

The boys shake sand from their hair, their Vans, and underwear. Sand spills from their belly buttons and trails behind them, endless breadcrumbs. Their feet move fast and their eyes even faster—darting over bicycle pedals and long legs nicked by metal.

These boys were once marshmallow men. Bumbling toddlers, smiles sticky from sweet jelly and peanut butter. Milk bellies, round as the moon, full of honey and oats and all things good.

Like taffy, they were stretched and chewed. Chewed and spit out by the world they knew. Their faces changed. Some shadow clouded their mother’s grace; some vice seemed to poison their holy place.

But poison, no, they say. Not poison. Not the venom of some green garden snake, but nectar, rather. Marshmallow fluff and peanut butter. Baked bananas and strawberry jelly. On teenage tongues, beer tastes like honey.

 

 

Julia Do is a junior at La Quinta High School in Westminster, California where she is the copy editor of the school yearbook. A recipient of two Regional Gold Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Julia attended the 2019 Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and has had her artwork and poetry published in Canvas Literary Journal. Her work primarily focuses on girlhood, family, and identity.

 

glide deep beneath the gilded blue-—in

somber, slipping sweet inside

for loveliness, in secret sand

and beats, in pulsing glow and hiss—

hammerhead, slide passively

drip, your darkly hanging maw

hunger, darling, toothlit bane

quiver love in flashing jaws

from seaward, vast eternity

throbs, electric flutter-time

a hundred fish, drawn gasping in

betrays electric lateral lines

now move, in false serenity

then pant: in ever-rasping gills

but even when the deed is done

the hungry searching never stills

 

and in this gaping chest of mine

in cartilage: no bony parts

nothing, dearest, satisfies

your roving bloodless sharkskin heart.

 

Olivia Lee is a junior in the Creative Writing Conservatory at California School of the Arts – San Gabriel Valley. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and Princeton University. She has work published, or forthcoming in LiveWire, Aerie International, DASH, Canvas Literary Journal, Polyphony Lit, and Body Without Organs Literary Journal, among others.

 

Did you know,
teardrops under a microscope
look just like snowflakes? I ask.

Frost spiderwebs our window into filigree.
We curl around each other,
sweaters in a drawer,
nautili in their shells.

Did you know,
if your name was Kai,
and I was Gerda,
I would come rescue you
from the Snow Queen? I ask

I’m too cold
to play this game, you grit out
through chattering teeth.
Radiators dead, bills unpaid,
we look out the window
at the crooked rivulets of snow
melting down the glass.

Did you know,
the world is crying?
I ask, but only in my head.

 

 

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, The Forge Literary, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Argot Magazine, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

 

it works like this:

things are never new—

just rearranged,

uncovered, broken

open. i was here

when the universe

unfurled & space

realized its

emptiness. i was here

when it bloomed.

a blooming. when

a small thing

becomes large

all at once & without

warning. we, of course,

do not understand

these types of things.

if you

think too hard

about it,

the law

does not account

for emptiness—

which did not exist

before fullness,

but can now be found

in all manner of

places. one summer,

i found an

emptiness.

it started in me

slowly

edges curling out

like the beginnings

of a flower. grabbing me

by the throat, stretching me

out & in. sometimes an

emptiness

is so large that a

thing becomes its

emptiness.

 

depending on

who you ask

i am a girl.

an empty one.

blooming.

blooming.

 

 

 

Malcolm Slutzky is a queer trans man and college student from New Jersey. In his free time, he enjoys studying physics and playing Scrabble against himself.

 

How I live is not unlike how my brother lives.
Though he never leaves the house. How my sister lives. Running,
fancy coffees, a fully felt political activism. How my father lives.
Aging ungracefully, but happy with Fox News and Eagles records.

How I live is not unlike
the barista, the cashier, the lab assistant. Who didn’t want that job,
or did. And maybe I’m really just like the man who yelled when we stopped at the light-
and started getting out of the car because my mother wasn’t driving fast enough.

How I live is not unlike the meadow
outside my window, vast and strung with power lines. The box turtle who came out yesterday,
ate and retreated slowly. The tree above his den
that died this winter and came back. Neither smaller or bigger, but different.

And I can’t tell if that’s sad. That I’m just like the leaves
changing in the fall. Dying. Returning. If I’m just like the tar stains on the sidewalk, the
ink blots off a printer, one piece of gum in a 14-stick pack. I can’t tell
if it’s wonderful.

 

 

Summer Carrier, a full-hearted lover of obscure history, Ritz crackers and Spider-Man, is an aspiring writer whose favorite thing about all writing is it’s simultaneous nature: able to both compartmentalize the world and break down its barriers. She hopes this poem, her first work to be published, does just that.