Issue Eight

I remember the weight.

I remember asking myself—

“Have you ever felt

This much on top of you?”

On your thighs on your shoulders—

Pushing your knees apart?

Have you ever screamed so internally?

 

I remember the sounds.

His tongue on my neck beating

My throat was shaking.

Hits 96 moaning in the background,

My choking echoing in the bass.

Screams would be preferable.

 

I remember before.

The drunkenness the smell of weed

And the car horn outside.

The weight and the thighs—

Sounds my neck him beating.

I remember his hand and the fear.

I remember the shaking the blood.

But I could not tell you what happened.

 

Hannah Gold lives and writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She hopes to attend Boston University next fall and study Russian Literature.

There’s a small tear on the photograph in my hands,

my knuckles the only shapes not tinged

yellow with age: the color of sunlight. My body trying

to step through the film— clouds in the picture,

swallowing. My grandmother, my mother

 

tells me: black hair against the shining lake spray,

dress in the wind, weeping willow leaves

brushed across the sky like ink. Standing alone,

looking away from the camera, away from my eyes

trying to peel something out of the fragile paper.

Look at me, I want to tell her,

 

look at the girl who visited your grave while clouds

rolled their bellies across the wet green fields.

The girl who thought in that silence

she could find our roots. In any silence.

But there is none here, only my grainy searching.

Only you, grandmother, so far away

 

from the girl in this picture. Almost as far as I am

from you, because you died when I was small

and I can only look, trying to hear your voice:

wind rippling the lost reeds. Brushing against your dress,

fluttering, transient.

 

I think I could be the wind. Grazing against

your cheek, grandmother. The world is silent

just around your face.

 

Taylor Fang lives in Utah. Her poetry has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sprout Magazine, HerCulture, and others, as well as recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She also enjoys journalism, piano, and tennis.

 

 

in the carnage across the road

lives a pod of film.

7.99 from the pharmacy, across

from the laundromat,

and i have left it

in carcasses

and skeletons

of foliage.

 

the travelers who live

behind the thicket of cactus

tell me of subway tile and redwood elevators

but soil takes my tongue

where the highway cuts through my mouth,

and the cicadas leave their skin outside

my bedroom window, where

the moon is

the cold end of an eraser.

 

opportunity has its own wheels and i either

make my own

or catch on

quick.

 

 

Heather Laurel Jensen attends Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Arizona. She is co-president of her Scholastic Art and Writing Awards affiliate, where she has been awarded ten times, and she was a participant in the 2017 Adroit Journal Mentorship for poetry. Her work is published or forthcoming in Best Teen Writing of Arizona and Polyphony HS.

the chair was as uncomfortable as were the bleachers we slept on when the game was done. however the pain was much worse than the burning sensation down my throat from back then. the needle hithithithithit and hit again on the surface of my skin. ‘distract yourself from the pain with pain in another area. pinch yourself’ he said, as he held the ultimate power over my body in his hand, as the inky needle hithithithithit and hit again. so I looked at you. and every moment of the golden hour was just all that much more volatile. and the pain was so much worse.

 

Sofia Scarlat is a fifteen-year-old short story and poetry writer, book author, traveler, movie and Chinese food enthusiast who finds making pancakes therapeutic and feels most at home in NYC. You can find her work in Whiteteethmag, Voices of Youth, The Paragon Journal and arts & culture Romanian magazine SUB25. She is a high school ambassador for Her Campus, as well as an editor for Artistique Magazine and blogger for her own website, where you can always find her, no matter where she is in the world.

erasure is

 

conviction boiling / at the line of screams

over autumn bruises / our faces

 

caged in river / this is where i weave ruses

& tell you how i          collect rust in the barrel

 

of my throat / when i look you are     de-aging

/ permafrost on lips / pretend that

 

only the earth is chapped & we          are not

full of fangs / bottle-glass for teeth while

 

you mourn our bodies long buried

in a windowless room / a pool of slaughter

 

tugs at my ankles / garden snakes coil ‘round calves

/ i lose step & watch

 

the whining of wings:  blue jays bleed open

egg shells         & fall out of the sky

 

/ what kind of death omen / tastes like apple cider?

requiems          have no place here:

 

remember softness / tell me how you

fractured your arm singing from

 

the cliffside / did you taste the           spill

of ocean like

 

grandiose rainfall or

did you drown in its yolk? / i ask

 

what you found on the hillside

& you lie / saying / nothing.

 

Stephanie Chang is a fifteen-year-old high school student from Vancouver, BC. Her work has appeared in The Penn Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Horn & Ivory zine. When not writing, she enjoys competing in debate tournaments.

 

At eleven, the burn left a dappled sea

across my legs. Picture body as terrain: swordfish threading

through reefs, divers rubbing their eyes in sleepless wonder.

Nurse told me to hold still. I couldn’t.

Mako sharks were circling their prey;

how they laced my thighs like silvered scabs.

 

There is coral under my fingernails

from kneading burn cream into the reefs.

These hands of mine raised tsunamis, banished

the anglerfish to its cave. Tell

the electric eel it is no longer safe. Tell

the skin-bubbles that Nurse’s needle

is baying for their blood.

(Like any good shark, it could taste fear.)

 

Five years later I pour green tea, unscathed.

A fly drowns in my cup. White hospital walls

dissolve with the tea leaves. Still I am afraid

of fish markets. Still it is not easy

to walk by rows of gutted eels and think:

             Look at you, brother. They’ve got you now.

 

Every time I look at the sea, it muscles

into something colder. Seabirds are sent to pick apart my thighs, dark burn-spots

evaporating, smoothening.

The pebbled waves wouldn’t know me now,

the way any good shark would call me alien

 

even though, I swear, I was animal once.

My skin wore bubbles like scales.

When I stole my body back from the tides,

I shook out the crabs from its pockets, listened to its pulse

the way fanged things fall in love with the night.

 

 

Nandita Naik is a junior at Proof School. She is published/forthcoming in the Rising Phoenix Review, Canvas Literary Journal, and Polyphony HS.