Poetry

 

Let me guess:

It is two in the morning and you are reading obscure eighteenth century poets under the covers

Wondering if there was a time when someone felt like you.

You’ve always hated the early, early mornings because they make you think of things you’d rather forget,

At least there is so no one around to hear your tears.

Let me guess:

Your friends have started telling you you’d look good in bikinis and you’ve started dreading summer for the first time.

They complain in the locker rooms at lunch but you are the one who pinches fat between your fingers.

I heard you once looked up black magic spells for losing weight,

You know you’re too smart for those fad diets they advertise in magazines.

Let me guess:

You have nightmares where no one is your friend,

The next morning you text everyone you know, it will be forty-seven minutes before anyone replies and by then you will have thrown your phone down the

deep

dark

pit

in your stomach where it belongs.

Let me guess:

You have only ever cut yourself open by accident, but once you trailed a knife along the inside of your wrist.

You burn your toast until it is hard and black and it scrapes up your gums

Citrus juice seeps into the cracks in your skin,

It stings,

That’s the point.

Let me guess:

You tell everyone you are scared of heights but sometimes you find the highest roof you can and look down until you are dizzy.

The truth is,

You’re aren’t scared of heights but you are terrified of falling.

 

Ellanora Lerner is an eighth grader who loves books and feminism and poetic things like sunsets.She hopes to write a novel that is both chillingly dark as well as enjoyable and direct a gender swapped Broadway revival. She has been previously published in Stone Soup and Teen Ink and her work can be found at sometimesithinkimpoetic.tumblr.com

 

 

As the leaves rustled in the breeze

like a whirlwind of denigration

he watched the traffic lights turn and turn and turn,

clutching the depressing paraphernalia of his trade,

lost in a perpetual state of penury.

 

With fleece frayed, in tatters unkempt,

his battered, homeless body whimpered through the night,

alas he could not rest for

the etheric blazes and illicit deals

inevitably came calling.

 

The angst in his eye as deities passed,

hollering goading prods, he agonized

for life was his offense, a wicked transgression,

as one whose sole existence

amounted to the gelid 6th and Allegheny

and the asylum of the big house.

 

Yet he loitered there

in wait for the noble traveler

the shrewd sympathizer

the proof that indeed,

someone was looking out for him.

 

How I wish I hadn’t turned away

with just one quick glance

for that instant slipped into

the coffers of my recollections

for, perhaps, an eternity.

 

Michael Cheng is a sophomore at Lower Merion High School. He enjoys writing poetry and has been honored with multiple keys in the Scholastic Writing Awards. Outside of writing, Michael also adores science and foreign affairs. He loves exploring.

 

 

Yes, this, this is the color.

 

The color of her tiny bed sheets,

because no one expected it would be a girl.

 

The color of his model airplane

that he builds himself, with balsa wood and Elmer’s glue,

and launches off the roof directly into a puddle.

 

The color of his breath

at the end of the first date

as they sit, limbs entangled, on the porch,

when all he wants to do is kiss her.

 

The color of their souls

as they walk along the windswept tides

of the ocean, after the sky has been cut open

and has fallen in deliberate wrath,

with a thin line of foam marking the former height of the water.

 

The color of the porcelain

they are given on their wedding day,

that they didn’t register for

but her sister thought looked quaint,

which they almost use the day he gets his diploma,

but it never makes its way down from the high cupboard.

 

The color of Carolyn’s sneakers

on her first day of kindergarten

at the big public school down the street,

as they say farewell to her at the door

with poorly concealed emotions

flying out of their grasping fingertips

they watch her skip into the void, unafraid.

 

The color of her smile

as she looks out at the dunes they used to traverse together

recalling his twinkling eyes the day he asked her to dinner,

the way he sang to little Carolyn,

his infernal habit of leaving the kitchen light on to attract moths,

how his mind stayed sharp when his body went numb,

and the way he used to place his fingertips

on the small of her back just to remind her he was there.

 

 

Hannah Berman likes singing more than talking and really would like to be a Disney princess some day.

 

a very old man in a camo baseball cap moves through fayette mall like the last monkey among machines  a mortal before the multicolored pantheon of waifish models leering from the forever 21 storefront  he is an artifact, a rusted axe blade jammed in the gears of a woodchipper  girls in tiny fringed shorts slither around his legs like snakes with plexiglass fangs        when he was a boy he watched his father break a runt puppy’s neck, tell him mercy was a bone shard severing the spinal cord so quick and clean                    he was a god once, his kind   now a stout brown woman’s errant stride knocks his walking cane askew                things weren’t supposed to change like this, all at once like a rug pulled from beneath his feet.

 

Serena Devi is an eighteen-year-old poet and screenwriter from Lexington, Kentucky. She plans to study journalism at NYU in Fall 2016.

My grandmother’s hands bear the rough soil of the harvest while

Working her fingers around the yarn, piercing

Beads of dried peas and bent rose petals as she makes her

Last granddaughter’s holy crown.

And on the stove sits a steaming pot of dolma nearby:

A baker’s dozen she made with those rough hands,

Spooning the seeds out the fat red bell peppers

Carving lids of their popping stems

 

Old men hunched

On their old backs,

Tired of their old scarlet blood.

 

My grandmother’s lips bear

The sweet songs of lore that

Sing of legends in the village house, muttering

The sorrows of men as she creates her

Last granddaughter’s divine scepter of tears and tales.

And on the stool lays the Quran,

Her deepest companion, which passed from her mother,

Who, with her delicate fingers and the blessings of God,

Wrote every slipping letter

 

Twisting tongues

That have whispered the words of Allah

For a thousand years, and will a thousand more.

My grandmother’s heavy heart bears

The thick fluid with which I am kin,

Kin with the mad men who stormed through

The rolling plains of the Orient,

With striding horses pummeling the ground under their gate,

Their wooden bows hanging in slow, piercing silence

 

Blood that fought to

Place each hunted bone

On my sacred throne.

 

 

 

H.B. Akcan currently attends the Global Studies Academy of Clements High School. She is an avid reader, writer, and binge-watcher. Her work has been recognized by the Columbia College’s National Young Authors Contest and she has submitted her literature portfolio for the Davidson Fellowship.