Poetry

My friends are moving away
Only separated by one district
but it feels like eternity
Our memories and laughter
are slowly forgotten as they
discover a life without me
and leave me me behind

My brother is moving away
Going off to college where
he’ll learn and change into
a completely different person
His future will become his
reality as he discovers himself
and leaves me behind

My mother is moving away
Her new job keeping her
busy on the weekends when
we used to have fun that is
now replaced by lonely nights
as she works to prove herself
And leaves me behind

My father is moving away
To a place where happiness
and calm is hard to come by
His fear and paranoia of himself
threatens to destroy my father
He becomes someone different
And leaves me behind

And I
am staying here yearning for
my life filled with childhood
and old pastimes where there
was no worry or stress or burdens

But I know
There is no going back to the
simple life I now long for
Because everyone is moving on
and I must move on with them
To a new and different life
with many barriers to face
but also new chances to take
I will move on

 

Laura is a thirteen-year-old eighth grade student attending Longfellow Middle School in Virginia. She loves poetry as well as other forms of creative expression such as photography and writing. Her style of poetry is about her experiences of loss and heartbreak but also of hope and new beginnings. She wants readers to feel empowered and leave with a message in their minds.

It is nearly too banal for us to understand:
This bumbling train
was the second
one out this morning. We missed the first in wild
disarray. My sister is the difficult one.
When she bends up her contentious form, she will untwist for nothing!

To the unglazed eye, this could seem like nothing.
My sister doesn’t understand
why Mom packed her the bruised peach, and me the good one.
Anyway, peaches are too messy to eat on a train,
where one must be mild,
fold hands, and count each second.

A floating nuclear plant stretches and contracts into a second
of chromatic blur. Blink and see nothing
but eyelid. Blink and miss wild
fir, bridges, workmen. The shapes outside the window seem to understand
Each other, in curving forth beyond the train.
And I am like the hot morning air for being on one.

I count one, Garrison, two Valleys, one commuting professor, then a second.
Most anyone can train
herself to relish menial things. Nothing
is beneath celebration. Not even this cracked seat, face backwards. I do not understand—
My sister rides so silent and mild.

Here is the lull, amidst or after so many wild
days and nights on docks and platforms. We need just one
smooth ride on the Metro North to understand
ourselves as travelers first, and settled or settlers second.
There is nothing
that can substitute a train.

And if my body were a train
—cars linked, tinted in mild
rust, and still going—I’d stop at nothing,
gather my fumes of exhaust in a stovepipe lung, following one
iron track as though it were the best and only place, letting every second
settle like dust at my sides. I suppose I hardly understand.
I wonder how, as it churns like a train, the next plod will flatten these to nothing,
(once wild for their novelty in my hands) these seconds.
My sister lets out one cough, then another cough, then we get off, before I understand.

 

Abigail Sylvor Greenberg is a high school student living in New York. Her writing has been recognized with more than sixty Scholastic Writing Awards and nine National Medals. In addition to writing, she enjoys watching comedy and drinking coffee.

 

In America, they see an outsider.
Blinded by my complexion:
A porcelain figure without the white sheen.
Their instinct says I can’t possibly be one of them.
But when I open my mouth to speak
Their senses debate the existence
Of such a familiar foreigner.
“Are you mixed?” they’d ask.
Mixed.
As if that’s the only acceptable answer,
As if I can’t be part of two worlds.

In China, they see one of them.
The comfort of a familiar face,
Another blossom in the bouquet.
But this veneer is fragile, too.
Shattered as soon as I open my mouth to speak,
Words laced with a distant tongue.
“Are you a foreigner?”
Their unspoken words
Singeing me around the edges,
Melting the mold I was supposed to fit in.

At first they saw a flower
Just where I belong.
But instead they see a dandelion
A weed all along.

 

 

Jennie was born in Boston, and has attended school in Massachusetts, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Her favourite subjects in school are English, History/Humanities, Drama and Fine Arts. She has a passion for reading, creative writing, geography, psychology, and aspires to be an author in the future.

In another life, I clawed the world
from the back of my throat

and cradled it to the bone
without making a single sound.

As a child, I would stream my thumb
across the stippled hairs on my father’s

chin—pressed my palms against
the shelf of his belly so I could become

familiar with what is human.
The first boy I fell in love with

carried himself in a long stretch
of pauses—deliberate and full-fledged.

We learned to love with the rhythm
of a labored breath—hushed by

our own inability to keep
ourselves taut and undamaged.

In another life, I hear my mother’s
voice colored by something that

lingers between a blunted breath
and a windowpane’s rattle.

One by one, we learn to love,
our backs bent in a prayer

that never touched our mouths.

 

Brittany Adames is a Dominican-American writer. Her work has been previously published in CALAMITY Magazine, Bombus Press, Blue Marble Review, TRACK//FOUR, and Rust+Moth, among others. She is pursuing a major in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College and currently serves as the poetry editor for Concrete Literary Magazine. She has been regionally and nationally recognized by the Scholastic Writing Awards.

I am in a cold city that smells of saltwater
and cigarettes. Their crests rising, skyward

roads undulate as homeless men sit on street corners,
their cardboard signs sturdier than their clothes.

The trolleys sing, motherly, a chorus of altos
and fussing construction drills. Believe me,

there’s more to this than meets the sky. Even now
in summer the wind knifes me; the savior sun;

dirty pastel blocks; blinding upsides of cumulus;
Chinatown glows; concrete after rain; the Bay

Bridge shivers; a silky sheen. Up the hill,
the symphony slogs behind closed doors.

 

Esther Sun is a junior at Los Gatos High School in Northern California. Her work has received national recognition from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and been published in The Wildcat Review, her high school’s literary magazine.

I finally learned how to take care of myself.
I’m a smile orange-peel wide.
I’m going to die movie-star happy,
Happy like soda left out on the countertop.

The moon is whiter than death. I drown my plants,
I kiss myself to sleep. I don’t talk about birds
Anymore. Can’t think about what it means
To fall. Won’t think about what it means
To fly.

 

Pelumi Sholagbade is a high school senior from Washington DC. When not writing, Pelumi can be found reading, playing the cello, or failing to fall asleep at night.