Poetry

Ghazal for a Black Cat

By Ellora Sutton

Shadows down the street like liqueur, black cat,
soft-ridge shoulders and rusty purr, black cat.

Nose in the air like her paws float on clouds,
starlight in her eyes, a silver bur, black cat.

There is something of the witch about her,
all natural, green and larkspur, black cat.

Dust-mote tongue laps the night from a puddle,
her empty belly full of myrrh, black cat.

She walks with all that history, worship,
coronation-stride to the future, black cat.

Rolls the quartzy night-smoke on her shoulders,
meanders like drunkard’s blurred slur, black cat.

Fireworks refract dreams onto dustbin lids
and it is all just fish to her, black cat.

Ellora Sutton is a British writer (and museum gift shop worker) who has recently graduated with a first in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University for the Creative Arts. Her obsessions include poetry and Jane Austen.

Waterloo Teeth

By Ellora Sutton

My canine is my great-great-grandmother’s.
Yellowed with age,
a well-read page.
The sediment
is fossilised with fables.
When I am lost,
I trace it with my tongue-tip
and soak up the Braille.

The burial mound of my wisdom tooth
is my ancestral aunt’s,
sleeping snug
like the lump of Australian opal
she left me.
A treasure, a milky thing.
A stone breast
resting in the gum
of the scarlet cloak
we keep in the airing cupboard.

My sunflower seed buck-tooth
is from the farm girl
that would germinate into
some flying bird part of me.
It is strong and broad
and the first thing you see,
a placard:
This girl is of the earth.

My third incisor is Victorian.
It tastes of elderflower cordial
and sepia photographs,
and reminds me
that even when I stand still,
stay silent,
time blurs past.

The altar of my molar,
nobody knows who that came from.
I think it is soft enough
to have been swept up
from the ashes
of witch-fire.
I can taste the scream of it,
and maybe that’s why
my lips have such a temper.

Ode to the Government Hall Girl’s Bathroom

By Amelia Loeffler

You, yellow stall walls who held me
When I cried before getting on the bus and going home,
Are strong despite your thinness.
Notes and names written in smeared sharpie on your doors
Are reminders that I am not the first to find sanctuary here.

You, warped mirror who tells me I look just fine
Even though I am too tall to be fully reflected in you,
Offer the reassurance I do not trust anyone else to give.
The way artificial light refracts in your bent glass
Gives my whole body a sort of halo.

You, faulty smoke detector who beeps without reason
Over and over and over,
Will not leave me alone with my silence.
Like a voice from above you echo off the tiled floors
And tell me there is no use in dwelling on what you cannot change.

You, beauty parlor, meeting place, smoke spot, safe space,
Are more than the sum of your parts.
You are midday solace, quiet comfort, gentle company,
My inanimate but unwavering guardian angel.

Amelia Loeffler is a high school junior currently attending The School for the Creative and Performing Arts at Lafayette High School, majoring in literary arts. Her work has most recently been published in The Messy Heads Magazine. Amelia can often be found roller skating and wearing funky pants with a coffee in hand.

The Grandchildren

By Anjay Kornacki

I am not a child of Bangladesh.

I am her grandchild.

And as a grandchild amidst the dinner party,

I would scoff:

at the hugs of my aunties,

and the spicy food that they hand-fed me,

and the bottles of Coke that were always flat.

Begging to go home, as my droopy-eyed cousins left with their families,

in ‘97 Camrys and champagne beige Corollas.

But when I grew up, and I was told the stories:

of the Language Revolution, that set our tongues free and gave us our voice,

of our uncles, the freedom fighters, who traded their textbooks for rifles,

of an operation they named Searchlight, and the sacrifices that followed,

What I thought was focus in my aunties’ eyes as they prepared that night’s surplus of food,

I realized was desperation.

Desperation to remember what home smelled like,

What it tasted like,

And how it sounded.

As children, clutching their panicking parents’ hands as they hurriedly rushed for Pan-Am flights

bound for the United States,

They could not take with them the tea plantations,

Or the sprawling mangroves of the Sundarbans,

Or Gulshan’s roundabout, center of a new capital,

Or Cox’s Bazaar’s pristine white sand.

But they brought with them midriff-bearing saris,

They brought the recipes, and the songs, and the boisterous, ever-loudening laughter that

only Chittagong’s children could produce.

They brought with them a history of outspoken women and fierce rebellion.

They brought with them what the rest of the world tried to call ‘East Pakistan’.

And so I feel shame at knowing I scoffed,

Knowing now how much was lost

to get me here.

Because that laughter was louder than their gunfire.

Because a nation’s streaked tears turned to a tiger’s stripes.

We have a duty, grandchildren.

Do not lose what they brought.

Do not let time and conformity do what Pakistan’s armies could not.

Heaven is a dinner party;

There are relatives there that we never had the privilege to be annoyed by,

Waiting with the hugs they never got to give us.

I am Bangladesh’s grandchild,

And I love my Nanu dearly.

A sophomore creative writing major at Colorado State University, Anjay Kornacki was born in Yonkers, NY to a Bangladeshi-American mother and Polish-American father, the aspects of his heritage making up the core of his writing identity. This is his first submission to a journal.

Written Missiles

By Clara Leo

Written Missles

Clara is a college sophomore studying economics and music. Considering that her life hasn’t quite started yet, there will be more to say about who she is later. Soon. Stay tuned.

Cicadas

By Elizabeth Kuhn

hide
in shifts of fours.
Four night shifts in a row, years before
we stop forgetting you exist.

We remember one hundred and twenty
decibel screams. Something tangled in my hair.
you’re half deaf. Dad,
in the car driving
a mile away
without us,
so the sound cut off.

It didn’t

You believe in coming out
only when you taste November
roots, like my toes
in mulch, under the bush
in our lawn. Your daughters bury you in

under sixty-four-degree soil
so we don’t see you for four years,
or seventeen

before you dig out. You sprout
like a weed
and swarm the irises
with a boot heel.

Your daughters pick your shells
off trees,
dig membranous wings

from under our nails. You cling
to the back porch, watch
bugs turn branches brown.

Inborn sirens
come in overwhelming swarms You don’t hear
when the trunk hits the grass.
You don’t pray
for the cicadas singing in our ears.

Elizabeth Kuhn is a literary arts major at Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, a magnet school for the performing arts. Her favorite genre is poetry and she won an honorable mention in the Scholastic Writing contest.