Issue 23

The infinite altruist to mankind
The majestic and naked azure
The color changing trickster
The empyrean that has known the globe for the
longest
The homebody of stars
The portmanteau of solar and lunar light
The bearer of clouds’ raw wrath, rage and
tantrums
The pursuer of hope and courage
The sacred weight on the shoulders of Atlas
The ultimate beginning and end of existence
altogether.

 

Sayantika Halder is a student from Nirmala Convent School Siliguri, West Bengal, India. She likes to read poetry and literature, from the works of Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Bukowski, Franz Kafka, to John Green and Rupi Kaur. In her leisure time, she writes poetry.

had death afflicted me before I ever lived
you would be a Texan
I could almost picture you
young, beautiful, and stressless
without the stretch marks across your belly
driving around in your two-door
blasting R & B in the Texas heat

had you went to the surgeons to have me removed prematurely
you would have never tried to stay with him
your heart
your pelvis
would have never been scarred
in my removal from you
I was born with a bad omen
with a nuchal cord

I still wonder if you have regrerts
had you unlocked the shackles
of me at seventeen
and left me to the world
would you be happier?
but instead you kept me out of faithful love   and I dare to wonder
did you make a mistake?

 

 

Kalvin Verner is a high school junior from Kansas City, MO. As a young child up to now, he has always enjoyed reading poetry but never got into writing poetry until early 2020. Verner has previously won a Scholastic Honorable Mention for his poetry, and he plans to continue expressing himself with words.

others overestimate my abilities
i am nowhere near as clever, confident or capable as they think i am
my carefully constructed facade has fooled them while the very vulnerability i attempted to hide was only amplified
even when i try and tell them, it is heralded as humility or humor
despite this massive mismatch, somehow their belief blossoms into big, beautiful dreams

but they feel borrowed

my mind screams

STOP

dreams like these don’t belong to someone like you

so, i store them away
until
something in that secret, sacred space inside myself whispers… what if?

 

 

 

Katherine Mendel is a computer science and mathematics student at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. Her poetry has previously been published in her college’s underground literary magazine, Surfaced. She loves reading, laughing and bread.

in the consequence of creation,
it’s a tuesday morning in my bed.
the windows shield cold weather
slights, curtains hung-tight-and-shut.

in my head,
this is a consequence of mayhem.
that the lesser powers crash against
each other, wielding the sort of chaos

that creates its own pretense.
in my bed, it’s a tuesday morning
like the tuesday morning before,
ages quietly passed like the breaching

of waves on a crag-lined shore.
in the consequence of creation,
starlight is buried in the dust
of our bones. like the tired,

creaking bone-dead stardust
i am a tired, creaking bone-wrenched
nerve-wracked star, in the consequence
of its conception.

it’s a tuesday morning like the ones
before. curtains shield the consequence
of a cold, unfolding youth collapsed inwards
of its quick, unyielding consciousness.

 

 

Grace Anderson is a freshman at University of Minnesota, Morris. They write to conceptualize interpretations of the world and their place in it, and can otherwise be found delving into fiber arts and reading fiction.

I could never figure out
the cheap trick all magicians know
where a ball hides under
one cup (of three), and when he
lifts it, bam, it’s disappeared beneath
the next one over, he reveals.

But the bugs are getting smarter,
as the spider in my kitchen
most particularly stowed inside
the heaviest cup I own
is — presto! — nowhere to be found
(I guess my house is his stage now).

 

 

Sydney Sackett is a Maryland-based freelance editor, artist, author, and D&D enthusiast when she’s not working on her latest manuscript, combining her passions for fiction and theatre. Her previous poetry publications can be found in literary journal MONO. and Frostburg State University’s Bittersweet anthology.

 

 

 

A girl
walks towards
the light
and disappears
into a cypress—
do you see
how this is a metaphor
for the apocalypse?
I still highlight
the word grief
in every poem I read.
It is something I cannot unsee:
the colour of a body wrung of joy
like the blue black colouration
of a protein test.
Again, tonight
I search the sky
and name the bleakest
star after me.
It is what I do
to keep hope alive:
call myself a thing capable of light.
call myself a thing incapable of light.

 

 

Ibe Obasiota Maryhilda Ben is a Nigerian. She has won the Bloomsday Poetry Prize 2020 and The African Writers’ Trust Prize 2018. Her works have appeared on Brittle Paper, Kreative Diadem, Poetry Column and elsewhere. She writes from Calabar, Nigeria. Follow her on twitter @obasiotaibe.