Poetry

My darling, you are a solar eclipse!
You are a catastrophic moment of confusion—
when everyone stops for wonder and breath.
You are chaos and you make me
lose my sense of future and also fear.
You are an abstract painting:
so yellow, so brown, so shining black.
You transcend comprehension;
you are a beautiful headache in
the innocent form of a human—
And you don’t even know it!
You have no idea that you are
an apocalypse! The lifting of the veil—
light and dark not so clear anymore,
together at last, rogue and wild.
You are as still as a shadow and silent.
Your voice is the bursting of a sunspot.
You are a contradiction: the very
idea of duality, brought to life
before me, tempting, you enchantress.
You are not shine and you are not shadow.
You are both, simultaneously,
tension in your relaxed constancy.
You are a braid of holy sins.
Your flaws are beyond perfection.
You are the devouring of celestial bodies.
I thought your outside was dark
and your inside was light but now
I’m sure it’s the other way around.
Or perhaps you’re both and I am not philosophical.

My darling, you are too human:
I’m beginning to think you might just
be a goddess. For what is a deity
if not each of us, amplified and tenacious?

 

Adeline Berke is a student in Massachusetts, where she enjoys playing viola, reading past her bedtime, and contemplating life. She participates in varsity cross country and track and field for her high school. Let it be known that she never wears matching socks.

He cracked an egg on the pavement, said:
That’s how you summon the sun.
Two yolks slid out, twin hearts
spitting steam on concrete.

I laughed. He didn’t. He had
a toothpick grin, tangerine eyes,
spoke only in upbeats. Whistled
through his molars like a cracked flute.

We played cards in a laundromat
with rules he invented as he went.
Every joker was a prophecy.
Every ace, a door left open.

He told me hope is a body
you drag out of floodwater—
slick, shivering,
still breathing.

He wore joy like a scabbed leather jacket.
Slicked his hair with rainwater.
When I said I couldn’t dance,
he kicked a boot through the ceiling.

Stars leaked in like broken neon.
He said: Look. You already are.

I tried to tell him about all my endings.
He folded them into paper swans,
set them floating
in the oil-spill river.

You see? he said,
grinning with the full weight of it,
Everything wants to live
a little longer.

 

Yishak Yohannes Yebio is the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate of Washington, D.C, and the Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Strathmore and Wooly Mammoth Theatre. His work has previously appeared on the Nowhere Girl Collective, the Eunoia Review, and the Inflectionist Review.

You cut my back by accident,
swinging your sword-branch in wild circles,
fending off the invisible ogres
invading the overgrown, emerald grass.
When you saw my indigo t-shirt darken,
you cried. I cried because you were crying,
and when Mom pressed the wipe
into soft split skin, I winced because you did.

We shared a pink bicycle, an illustrated Bible,
pastel crew socks, bedtimes, muffins,
a made-up language of English and Arabic
that dwindled the further we got in school.
We argued over TV shows: Scooby-Doo or Rugrats,
the best kind of chocolate, the best Roald Dahl,
our inheritance: Dad’s knack for storytelling, yours;
Mom’s somber thoughtfulness would become mine.
We didn’t know fate was genetic then,
so we argued to tears, to scratches, to laughter.

Our childhood was covered in thin Band-aids
that we wore like badges of fortitude,
the emblems of vigorous sisterly love.
Now a warm, dreamy haze has covered the scars
and I remember the little you kindly, though
I guess even memory is violence.

Memory cracked our bones and stretched our limbs
until we were strangers, grown and incongruous.
Memory hacked off the white-noise weeks
and the weary peace of tiring dog days,
so all that remains is intensity.
Memory scraped hidden meaning away,
willfully mistranslating our souls,
making us light, making us liars.
Memory cut off our flesh,
raising our skeletons to the forefront
like living dead, silent zombies;
because we lacked the words to say
the difficult things in English,
we hungered for the mother tongue
without ever knowing it’s what we both craved.
Like memory, language was a battlefield
and we settled on the truce of a grudge.

In that way, memory was also betrayal
but it looked so true and lifelike
glowing there in adulthood’s twilight
that I thought its ephemeral body was yours
but young again, but mine again.

 

Suzi Peter is a Sudanese-American poet from Knoxville, Tennessee. Some of her other work has appeared in Short Vine and The Mockingbird. When she’s not writing, she enjoys running, taking long walks, watching films, and, of course, reading.

Dadi says there are two kinds of thirst:
the one that leads horses to river, the one
that leads girls to marriage. Each monsoon,
she teaches me to read prophecies in rainfall—
how water, like family, knows a thousand ways
to enter a body uninvited. In her stories,
every daughter becomes a well where mothers
drown their own reflections. Every daughter
learns to swallow oceans without showing salt
on her tongue. Last night, I dreamed Dadi’s
wedding bed turned to river, her body dissolving
into all the tears she never allowed herself.
She wore silence like a second skeleton,
rattling beneath her sari’s silk. Even now,
decades after her burning, I find scattered bones
of her unlived life: a cinema ticket stub,
half-written love letter, English primer
with penciled dreams in margins. Amma
says women in our family are born with gills—
not for survival, but for knowing how
to breathe through drowning. At night,
I press my ear to her door, count rhythms
of her midnight gasping: each breath
a small resurrection, each exhale heavy
with the weight of swallowed stories.
In morning light, we rebuild ourselves
from water damage: steam rising from chai
like ghosts of almost-spoken truths,
while Amma teaches me to read weather
in a husband’s hands, in the barometric
pressure of his moods. Some nights I wake
to find her filling mason jars with rain,
preserving storms like family recipes.
Says every daughter needs an ocean
of her own. Says thirst is another word
for learning to drink your own drowning.

 

ANUJ JAIN is a poet and community organizer from the San Francisco Bay Area whose work explores the intersection of cultural identity and linguistic transformation. Growing up in an immigrant household, he witnessed language’s power in both presence and absence. His poetry navigates the space between Mother Tongue and English, embracing contradiction rather than forcing simple answers to complex questions. When not leading educational initiatives and research for systematic change, Anuj can be found on tennis courts or scribbling verses on the backs of research papers, searching for beauty in the gray areas that science alone can’t capture.

Ghosts roam the nearby international orange,
in view of precious plots, this land-
not mine, not anyone’s you know.

A rich mound of people who say:
“Well, this has to be the most beautiful city in the world!”
The hunched overs pushed so far from here
they lie like zombies in the place we govern.
Hills on hills of green lush
federally protected eye candy.
Don’t let them fool ya-
not baby ruth or twix or sour patch,
but a stash of trimmed hedges, clean edges.
Red and Blue shine as
Safeway carts and blankets
park under pine.
Disturbing the peace.
Our piece.

San Francisco made density test.
A Mr. Gerry chemistry experiment.
An Aunt Mandy salad dressing in summertime.
Cream rises to the top, say something

One percenters here, hunched overs there
Refuse to blend, numb, heels dug in, eyes fogged over,
atop the rich-mound in the Richmond.

 

Finn is 17, the youngest of four, and lives in San Francisco. He spends a lot of time playing basketball, but writing, mostly poems and short stories, has always been where he really figure things out. His favorite book is A Visit from the Goon Squad because it captures how messy and layered life can be. When he is not on the court or writing, he is usually at the beach with his dog or out sailing, trying to catch a quiet moment.

Attached to the main house, but only accessible
by way of tsinelas-clad feet. First is the step from seamless white tile to
concrete, steep enough to stumble. I certainly do, despite the wooden
door frame. More than once. If I can manage two, three near-misses in less than
eight days, how much more Auntie May, Lolo Badong, all my mother’s
family who can truly call this house home? But this is
Guinobatan, town small enough for a guarantee that someone will
hear and catch your fall. Tread down, turn left, look up,
in wait lies the stairs: drippingly steep, tropical heat
kissing every inch of skin. After the peeling, off-white incline, the door
latch—untouched for seven years. The last time I passed by. Inside:
musty. The first word that wafts through my nostrils, like
nothing else in hyper-sanitized suburban America. Naturally, dust
overlays everything. Lolo Badong’s steel bookcase, hundreds of titles on
philosophy and religion and Filipino history. How I wish that but a
quarter of them could fit into my suitcase, a priceless inheritance for the
ride home. A murky-eyed Beanie Boo, sooty and sitting
silently. I apologize for the seven years of solitude but never take him home.
To my home. This, now, is his. According to my mother, this room is really
Uncle Padi’s. Padi for priest. Everyone calls him the humblest, most
virtuous person they know. I’ve christened him my living patron saint.
When his days of white t-shirts and plain sandals and
‘xtraordinary service are over, he’ll have only the room of his
youth to return to. As hallowed as this tower may be, the
zone of true peace lies on the balcony. Admittedly, it’s not quite
a tower’s grand lookout, more so one rooftop among many.
Between chiseled stone rails and the ceiling of our suite,
clotheslines sway softly, awaiting embroidered panties and skinny jeans to
dry. The ghosts of my mother and Lolo Badong linger in the
evening air. When she was the youngest daughter and he was her
father. Even the crumbs of their conversations haven’t lost their taste:
grades, God, the tangled threads that lie at a small town’s
heart. Or not. A decade later, she followed her sisters to the stars, hence why
I stand here today. Here: made in America, 24-hour flight to Manila,
jumping the meridian between tomorrow and today just to
kiss my lolo’s age-spotted hand, to light a candle at my
lola’s locked tomb. But I am a country divided, a house united unto
myself: my heart, too, haunts the tower suite. An archive, a lighthouse.
Never will we be too far to meet again.

 

Christine Novelero is a creative writing student at Kinder HSPVA in Houston, Texas. She is a Scholastic Writing Awards Gold Key winner. Her writings have been published in Scribere, The Weight Journal, Voice & Virtue, and others. Outside of writing, she is a chaser of sleep, a dancer at heart, sister to three cats, lover of soft things, an unwitting seeker of metaphor, and a passionate volunteer.