Fall Poems 2021

2:37 AM is an ungodly hour / it is glass breaking, thumbs without grip / it is an emptiness, it is souls leeched hollow / it is hair stuck on my shower wall, tangles caught on combs, brushes, / it is my stomach replaced by a paperweight.

it is unequivocally human, perhaps most human of all / syncopated breathing in out in out in out / it is claustrophobic, time stops moving / i hold down the hands of the clock with my excess paperweight

2:37 AM will be written on my epitaph / my obituary will be written at 2:37 AM with a paperweight on the edges of the paper-light / sheets of white, light light feather light / 2:37 AM is when i pull out the measuring tape and / paperweight

2:37 AM / wrangled bodies scattered in pencil-thin margins / i am locked in my medicine cabinet, final. quiet / the hurricane rages outside, raucous, / my cocoon is untouchable by the storm on the outside / inside, maybe not / but no fear, my forms held down by a paperweight. they will not fly away. / will i?

i do not have a paperweight to hold me down.

my skin is waxy / my hair does not stay in my scalp / my fingers do not stop vibrating? why / i am cold. it is too cold / someone turn up the heat / my pencil hurts my fingers i squeeze it too tightly / i am still cold / papery eyelids, mache hidden in breastbone / held down by a paperweight

i watch / as i atrophy / at 2:37 AM / it goes on / forever / or maybe just a moment. because then / at 2:38 / i hide it away,

my paperweight / is just another skeleton in my closet.

 

 

Halle Ewing (they/she) is a fourteen-year-old from Orange County with a love for the written word. She finds herself reflected in the lines she writes, and when they aren’t frantically trying to remember that one word on the tip of their tongue, they’re drinking way too much coffee, playing water polo, or begging her friends to take pictures of them. Their work can be found in Paper Cranes Literary Journal, Crossed Paths, and Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, and the Weight Journal. Her Instagram handle is @halleewingg.

mother sculpts me out of yellow river clay, kneads my ribcage
into shape, leaves me in the afternoon sun to dry.
by evening, there is already a lump in her mouth. she reaches in,
finds my name tucked beneath her tongue. breathes life into my still
clay hands.

when I am five, mother and I are close: umbilical cord
intact in our dreams. hands like silk, voice
like a bright, clear window of light. mother tells me
there was once a man who cracked the universe into halves
like a chicken egg, willed himself into the world until his breath
became wind, his bones diamonds, and his left eye the egg-yolk sun.

I am nine, and the sky is broken. curtains of rain falling
from holes in the sky. mother is perched on the windowsill,
five-colored stones and needle and thread in her hands.
I try to say thank you but the words fall out of my mouth—
native language severed at the spine. to me,
forgetting is an unclean word. forgetting is the knife with which i cut
out my own heart from my chest and leave it to rot. mother sees this,
takes my silence as regret before leaping
towards the fractured sky.

at fifteen, I have already chosen a new name for myself— a shiny new
american thing. its edges are too brittle, syllables too sharp
for mother to swallow
without drawing blood. mother,
stop pretending that you don’t shiver every night before
you fall asleep. stop pretending that I don’t cover my skin so the sun
won’t stain me a deeper shade of yellow. stop pretending
that I can still recall the imprint of your palms
on my clay skin. I look outside
and the sky ruptures into turtle shells and ashes.
holes everywhere. I call for mother
but she is nowhere to be found.

 

 

Fiona Lu is a poet and a student at Hillsdale High School. She is passionate about storytelling, no matter what form it may take. In her free time, she likes to draw, read YA novels, and take walks with her family.

 

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.