Issue 30

Arrival of Dawn

By Okoronkwo Chisom

As a child, my grandmother taught me
to crochet hopes from the yarn of dawn.
To enter each day exhaling yesterday’s pains.
In this poem, I crop out the lines that have the images of men,
who yesterday, gave their bodies to the sky & got folded into night.

Once, a teacher told us to reinvent our country’s ruins into rainbows,
to graffiti our fatherland on the hearts of strangers without spilling
our vulnerabilities.

Each day, I, a patriot, break into the aurora with my mouth
harboring songs for my country.
I’d shape my eyes to see the beauty in sunrise
& my legs to walk into the day, without fear of
treading on roads paved with blood.

Okoronkwo Chisom is a young first-class graduate of English Language and Literature. She is the International Advisor–Nigeria, of the African Writers Summit–Afwrites. She is the winner of the Delyork Creative Academy writing contest 2021, and a joint winner of the Sound of Unity spoken word poetry competition 2023. She was longlisted in the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize 2021 and has been shortlisted in the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize 2022, Splendours of Dawn Poetry Contest, August-October edition 2022, YouthhHubAfrica FGM contest, September edition 2022, and African Feminist writing contest 2022. Her works have been published or are forthcoming in PoetryColumn, Isele Magazine, Blue Marble Review, Icreatives Review, World Voices Magazine, New Man Gospel Magazine, Shuzia, BPPC anthology, and elsewhere.

my backpack ate my homework

By Kat Falacienski

I hated the way my cursive sagged when I got tired, how the loops of the letters became either bloated bags or sad smudges. I hated the milky skin of correction fluid, how it clung to the tip of my pen and I had to pull it off with my fingers. I hated when my papers couldn’t fit perfectly i eraser dust stuck to the page instead of blowing off. I hated the crumbly detritus at the bottom of my pack, the leaves of paper and pine needles of lead and twigs of snapped-off pencil clutches and pebbles of pink-black rubber. I hated my broken protractor, even though there was no point in fixing it once I got to high school. I hated that fifteen-year-old me picked “Incunabulum6” as my College Board username, not realizing that I’d never be able to change it. I hated that Google Docs were always, always set to 11 pt Arial when the only proper font is 12 pt Times New Roman. I hated how my planners were filled with scratches and scribbles. I hated that I lost my copy of The Things They Carried. I hated how curled up I was, a moth refusing to emerge from the cocoon. I couldn’t remember the exact moment when my messy multilegged self had decided to hang dormant, to be blown but never detached by the wind. Now, even my messiness was neat the eraser or a flip of the page.

Kat Falacienski is a student at Colorado College. She has been published in Teens Resist, Affinity Magazine, the

Paper Planets

By Em Townsend

Venus (planet of love) landed on my face last night. The only falling star within
these four walls, flimsy & decorated with 25-cent swirls. The last of her kind.
She’s held onto the ceiling for dear life since I was 6. As a kid I’d wake up with
glow-in-the-dark planets sprinkled on my bed, uncovered by the rustling of
sheets.

With time, memories peeled off the walls, entire years that once burned with life
now fainter than a cloud of dust. Neptune was buried under photos of
homecoming dances, Pluto dim next to faces of friends I don’t speak to anymore.
The day Mercury’s clump of sticky tack finally gave way, I didn’t bother hanging
it back up. Nobody lives in that bedroom anymore, but the solar system kept
burning.

I used to worry one would fall out of orbit & I’d accidentally swallow it overnight. I googled Can you chew in your sleep? I didn’t know at what point the stickers would flicker out and go dark forever. My body would be celestial in its own way. I would be glowing from the inside out.

Em Townsend (they/she) is a queer nonbinary writer and student from the Washington D.C. area, currently attending Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. An English major, college radio nerd, and nature enthusiast, Em enjoys watching ’80s teen movies, reading, and looking at trees. Their work has previously appeared in Club Plum Literary Journal and HIKA magazine.

Recess

By Arihant Jain

Recess: As the two boys scale the towering letters of “Pismo Beach”, their determined expressions and outstretched arms speak to a sense of adventure and exploration. The bold, vibrant colors of the letters stand in stark contrast to the muted, lowkey tones of the surrounding landscape, emphasizing the excitement and joy that comes with discovery. Yet there’s a sense of nostalgia too, as if the boys are reaching back into the past and pulling something timeless and treasured into the present. Perhaps this artwork speaks to the idea that, no matter how far we go or how much we change, there will always be a place for us in the familiar landscapes of our memories.

Arihant Jain is an artist and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area who melds his passions in engineering and writing to create poetry. He is Teen Sequins Top 5 Featured Poet and his work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and National YoungArts Foundation. When not creating, he enjoys solving algorithmic problems.

Seasonal

By Isabella Dunsby

Isabella Jia Dunsby is a high school student in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has previously been published in The Daphne Review and Cathartic Literary Magazine among others.

Paradise Pharmacy

By Julian Riccobon

Cashback, the magic word. Like wishing for more wishes.

In Paradise Pharmacy, you buy yourself a toffee, thirty-three cents, and then you ask for twenty back; those bloody bloody Andrew Jacksons. You swipe Mama’s card, that blue plastic genie, and the cashier simply gives you the cash. No questions asked.

It’s like stealing cajeta from a baby.

Every Sunday, you come back for more; Mentos gum and jelly nails and those fake eyelashes that fwip-fwip-fwip like butterfly wings. You keep wishing for more wishes till your pockets are stuffed and you’ve got lollipops sticking out your mouth, and you walk out of the store, happy as a clam till Mama comes up with her nostrils flaring…

“No más tarjeta para ti,” she snaps, swiping the blue genie right out of your fingers. “Not even food stamps.”

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.

***

Next time, you go to Dollar General and try to look eighteen. You ask for a pack of Newports and the cashier simply raises his eyebrow, and then rings you up.

En serio. It’s really that easy.

Outside, you hold up the little yellow sticks and you wonder what to do with them. Too late, you realize, you should’ve bought a lighter, too, but now your courage is gone and you can’t screw it back to the sticking place.

Aw, screw it. You just stick the unlit cigarette between your teeth and walk down the street, thumbing your belt loops and trying to play it cool. Como los jets y los tiburones. Like a rumblefish, playing pool. All the while, you know you look stupid, but you don’t really care.

What were you thinking! Mama says, when you walk in the door. It is an exclamation, not a question. She snatches the cigarette from your lips and stamps it out on the floor, even though it wasn’t lit. You trying to kill me, huh? she says. Trying to break my poor heart?

All you can do is shake your head. The shame will catch up with you later.

***

The final time, you don’t even bother with the card. You just snatch the painkillers right off the shelf.

Mama is gone now; long gone, and she took her blue plastic genie with her. Her poor heart broke, just like she always predicted – though it was the cholesterol that killed her.

It wasn’t your fault. You know it wasn’t.

All that she left behind was the apartment with its peeling paint and the hole that you kicked in the wall. The apartment, and the car with the busted muffler, and the debts that she’d collected over the years, like stamps.

They are her debts, that’s what you like to think. Inherited. But sometimes you wonder if maybe they are your debts, too, from all those jelly nails you bought, all those Mentos. Maybe they are your debts, shaped by your grubby fingers, by your ravenous mouth.

You were all mouth as a kid; just a monster with braces and teeth. Like Charybdis, always gnashing and hungry. Sometimes you would open the fridge and find only milk inside. Sometimes you would find Mama crying outside the drugstore, gripping the Marlboros that she quit years ago. You would find her eating candy in the bathroom – at least it looked like candy – those pale-colored Mentos from the bottles on the sink.

Don’t you ever grow up, mija, she would say. Prometeme.

Once upon a time, you used to believe in genies, but now you just believe in bottles.

***

On the way out of Paradise Pharmacy, you walk past the liquor store and the security guard waves to you. You don’t wave back. On the way out, you pass Solo Shoes and the Taco Bell and the Shell station with its sickly yellow light. You take those painkillers down to the tunnel under the 8, rattling the pill bottles like maracas, as you go. Vamos a bailar, mijita. Tiempo de bailar.

You sit down, in the drifting tornado of litter, in the piles of pigeon shit, and you pop the pills one by one, but you stop at the recommended dosage – you always stop, because you don’t want to end up like Mama. Nah, you don’t want to roll off the deep end, ¿si? You just want to daydream for a little while. Maybe you will fly to an oasis in the Mojave Desert. Un oasis en el paraíso. Maybe you will sleep in the shade of the palm leaves. Maybe you will wake up to find a genie standing over you: Your wish is my command.

It is dark in the tunnel, and the cars scream overhead like a migraine.

When you hold out your hand, the pigeons flutter down to peck the pills from your palm. They cock their heads and shuffle sideways and they stare at you with goo-goo eyes as if to say, Carajo, this ain’t bread.

Closing your eyes, you try to imagine stoned pigeons flying over San Diego; they would wobble and bobble like drunken drones. Stumbling into skyscrapers. Careening into streetlamps. The thought, in itself, is enough to make you laugh.

“So this is it,” you say to the pigeons. “This is what paradise looks like.”

But the pigeons are gone now – too far gone to answer, and even if they weren’t, you’d be too far gone to listen. There’s nothing else left to do, so you give the pill bottle a little kick with your toes and you watch as it rolls away down the tunnel, a runaway maraca. Escucha el ritmo, mija. Que ritmo bonito…

It is almost funny – the frenetic way that it rolls – as if it can’t get away from you fast enough.

Julian Riccobon (he/him) is a writer, editor, and artist of Italian/Panamanian descent, and the Managing Director of Polyphony Lit, an international literary magazine for teen writers and editors. His work has been published in The Acentos Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, and F(r)iction Lit, among other places, and his favorite genres to write are contemporary fiction, magical realism, and historical fiction. He is currently drafting a magical realism novel about a bunch of loco neighbors who live together in a row house in San Diego.