Fall Poems 2021

in my dreams, I enter a Cathedral
and Mary waves back. Gothic statues
were made of oak and marble: she is
shifting stone. Saints surround. In the
corner of my eye, I see her wink.

Devotion depends on the subject:
old Catholics called her the Queen of
Heaven. Protestant Reformation diverges
from the past: Calvin and Luther argue
for lower praise. Evangelicals say she
deserves no elevated privilege. But
doctrine shifts over time, a high and
low tide of the conquerors and the
conquered, and I wonder if there is
an alien species who will one day
impose their own beliefs upon us,
one where Mary doesn’t exist at all.

In Central Park, I pray to twenty-nine
statues: Hans Christian and his ugly
duckling, Alice and her White Rabbit,
the Angels atop the Bethesda.
They don’t wink back.

I enter the Cathedral and pray

 

 

Natalie Hampton is a junior at the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in the Creative Writing Department. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the Harris County Department of Education, the Young Poets Network, the Pulitzer Center, and Ringling College of Art and Design. She serves as an editor at Polyphony Lit and Cathartic Literary Magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

you place a penny in the crook of my collarbone and laugh, the hollow deepening as my shoulders rise with my lips, copper melding into skin. a fruit fly flies too close to my face

and instinctively i clap. i open my palms to reveal tarnishing metal: to find wings like clovers, petals half bent

and symmetrical. your laugh and the clap of my palms are the only sounds

all night. i open my lips to say something, anything, but what do i say?

that i wish i wasn’t so scared

of bugs, and if i wasn’t, perhaps it would have survived?

that when you drove to my house that day and i went to hand you my old textbook, i wanted our palms to touch? that i wanted you to stay

for more than a minute? for now,

the hum of the vents, the artificial cold air. the way that i can’t see your mouth in the dark but i can tell that you smiled.

the blinking lights outside. the memories of neon signs,

ducking from rain and into udon stalls, cupping paper trays of takoyaki. for now, i tell you that there will be a heaven made of osaka sunsets. for now, i take these words in my palms and call it home.

 

 

 

 

Kristine Ma is a writer and high school senior hailing from Michigan. She received three national gold medals and several other recognitions from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Additionally, her poetry has been recognized by the Young Poets Network and appears in or is forthcoming from Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Hunger, Up North Lit, The Indianapolis Review, and Bridge: The Bluffton University Literary Journal, among others. When she isn’t writing, she can be found playing piano and oboe, watching anime, and dreaming.

Mar*riage: the legally or formally recognized union of two people
as partners in a personal relationship.

 

My father leaves my mother at the altar.
Years from now I embrace this idea.
I reject any concept of happily-ever-after,
forever-and-always bullshit that conquers
our television screens from a young age.
While discussing the divorce of John Mulaney
And his wife, a coworker tells me
“humans aren’t meant to mate for life,”
His words imprint on my mind like a baby’s
first handprint into clay. Mate for life.
I never believed in soulmates either.
I am the grandchild of divorce,
the lovechild of wasn’t meant
and to be.
I breathe in forgotten anniversaries,
Neglected wedding rings, and
Broken vows.
In return, I exhale out the
inability to lend my heart
to a stranger.

 

 

Annalisa Hansford (they/them) is a freshman at Emerson College. Their poetry has been longlisted for Grindstone Literary’s 2020 International Poetry Prize. Their work appears or is forthcoming in The Rising Phoenix Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Poetic Sun, and The Hearth Magazine. In their free time, they enjoy listening to indie music, rubbing their dog’s belly, and eating vegan ice cream.

The hawk’s eye glistens fire as the hunter’s moon rises above the horizon. This twilight is for heritage, for custom. She perches atop the fractal oak. Tonight, the field will shiver and hold its breath—tonight, she will remember what it means to be mortal, what it means to be a beast. In the distance, a rustle—in instinct, she pivots, leaps, and spreads her remiges—angelic, but an angel that kills. Soon, she is a lighting shadow, glazed in crimson, upon the amber below. Her home is the sky, and her prey must reside in her mandible. This is war. So perhaps there is some purpose behind the feather she always leaves behind— to remember even a fraction of herself before the hunt, before the harvest.

 

Brisk mouse scuttles off—
autumn fields dance in the wind—
diving hawk lives on.

 

 

 

Suhrith Bellamkonda is an Indian-American poet from Mountain View, California. Like most, he likes staying up late and sleeping in. Indeed, he’s quite a normal teenager. He tries his best. He searches for inspiration. Nothing dramatic happens in his life, so he resorts to writing about nature and his childhood. He has been published in the Stanford Anthology for Youth and has won several county-wide poetry contests. His favorite character is the em dash— his favorite word is ‘again’.