Poetry

Shirtless

By Joseph Christensen

My pale frame rests under a dark V-neck

Skinny some say

Yes, I suppose…

Guys loll in easy confidence

Gifted with lines and shadows defining them

Chiseled features, six-pack abs, sensitive yet strong

“No, no, I think I’ll keep my shirt on.”

“I’m cold,” a lie

I shiver for effect

They effortlessly roll their golden shoulders, “Whatever”

Perfection doesn’t care

I’ll wait an hour

Dusk will help hide my skin and bones

“It’s fixable,” I say

“I’ll work out,” a false promise

Ten push-ups after nine p.m.

Behind locked doors in a narrow space

Chiseled features

The ground comes up to meet me, number ten

Trembling arms pull me under sheets

My V-neck will never stretch to accommodate my bulk

Girls won’t giggle at my strength

When the shirt comes off, what am I?

Skinny some say

Human I say

Joseph Christensen will be a senior this fall at Bellevue High School in Washington. His hobbies include: pondering the perplexities of life over bowls of chocolate ice cream and pretending to be professional.

A Petrified Conversation

By Anna Lund

The word Love

like a pebble under my tongue

It takes a second of awkward maneuvering to dislodge

and tumbles to your feet

We both stare for a moment

I turn my gaze back to your face

and bear witness to a stone of your own pressing against your cheek

You scoop it out

let it rest on your tongue

Then slowly reveal

my undoing

The word Sorry

Anna Lund is a writer and artist attending high school in northern Minnesota.

Lines for someone who disappeared from poems I never wrote

By Archita Mittra

half-lit classrooms/ january sunlight/tasting new words on my tongue/ words i will later make poems, out of
this, this is not a love letter/i love you the way one falls in love with a painting/ across time and space, endlessly/though mythologies of longing/ letting go is a kind of slipping
half-finished conversations in shadowy corridors/ my claustrophobic stories like ghosts in summer heat/the tragedy in being so close..yet invisible/ even in dreams, i am colourless
and your voice, a cantillation and the sound of my name (something beautiful) and the bell ringing like a knell/ (all i ever wanted was a universe where time machines exist)
waking up in a dreamed-up world, a mythical venice or a strange arabian city stolen from postcards or ancient stories whose endings we have lost, over the centuries, so we invent new and better ones/ false alarms/ in that universe, we are not so distant, you and i
confession/ i never stopped to realize just how entangled i am, with vines of identifies and whims and dreams clinging onto the rusty, crumbling walls of my heart/ desperation, (i)solation, death/ i, the lonely half of a hyphenated word
i sometimes speak of myself in the second person, only to lose myself/ if you and i/ if you were i/ the way words lose their meanings when you repeat them enough times/doors opening into doors opening into doors you were closing all the while/ not you, i meant i
if i (not you) write a suicide note, it would read: i cry because i cannot make myself understood/ i who yearn to write love songs to the stars
autumn playgrounds/swinging to strange heavens on rusty swings or sliding down to dusty hells of fallen leaves and memories/ there is no goodbye when imaginary friends die/ does anyone mourn for burnt diaries
trapped in a world that no longer exists/ my loneliness is like an empty train station in the wee hours of night that waits impatiently for something, someone/ to happen;

Archita Mittra is a wordsmith and visual artist with a love for all things vintage and darkly fantastical. A student of English Literature at Jadavpur University, she is also pursuing a Diploma in Multimedia and Animation from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. She has won several writing contests and her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications including Quail Bell Magazine, eFiction India, Life In 10 Minutes, Teenage Wasteland Review and Tuck Magazine, among others. She occasionally practises as a tarot card reader.

You can read more of her work on https://thepolyphonicphoenix.wordpress.com/

Cartoon

By Natalia Coiro

I wish I was a cartoon

Dancing to my own theme tune

With no physics to tie me down

Full of fun just like a clown.

I could have a thousand lives

Impaled with a thousand knives

And still stand tall

And fight them all.

I wish I was a cartoon

As crazy as a loon

Your imagination’s the only wall

Your dreams, a power to rule them all.

Natalia is sixteen-years-old and lives in South Africa. She is British and American. She started writing poetry when she was in a place to help her with depression. She continues to write but has started to move to film to express herself.

Him

By Michael Cheng

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.

This is the Color

By Hannah Berman

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.