July 2021

Blessed, 19 years old in June, a cursed blessing —

giggly drunk as basement gods blessed —

trampoline danger game, bleeding chin blessed —

God-can-hear-you-bad-mouth words blessed —

pirate island in my cousin’s backyard blessed —

college-kids-in-love blessed —

wishing on Ostara stars, Lake Erie blessed —

what-should-my-writer-name-be blessed —

washing background tables for coins blessed —

under-the-door-petrichor, storm-breaking traffic blessed —

Winter-Long hair, Spring-Short temper blessed —

Mom’s snip-snip, split ends dead blessed —

broken 2 AM-suburb-train blessed —

willing cells to age, mourning cosmic youth blessed —

Blessing the young, middle, old, dead, alive, blessed.

 

 

Julieanne Larick is a Midwestern Best of the Net-nominated poet. She studies English and Environmental Science at The College of Wooster. Julieanne reads prose for GASHER Journal. She has poems published in perhappened mag, Blue Marble Review, NECTAR Poetry, and others. Her portfolio is http://www.julielarickwriting.com and her Twitter is @crookyshanks.

stone angels linger in the walls of hospitals and
curse you
painting the dust a dull Advil red
while you walk down the ominous white halls
nearing a heartless clinic where the angels made of flesh
brush white paste on your skull and stick
icy metal disks in your parched, stale hair
and tell you to go to sleep, go rest in
the bed the sun speckles with its light
and go to sleep so they can see the screeching in your
brain, the eclectic electricity of pathological
ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs
in your dreams you damn the winged statues
and as you wake you wait and wait and wait
for sheets of paper that tell you how infectiously
the voltaic sparks have contaminated your
abysmal neurology, learning three days after
your imprecated sleep that aberrations permeate
your brain from every angle
and in the presence of absence
(as the doctor called it; some kind of seizure)
/æbˈsɒns/, sudden disruption of consciousness
you wish you could be
an angel, too

CA Russegger is a Filipino writer whose work doesn’t appear anywhere much, but who loves history, literature, and dogs.

how can i pull a kind of reckless
reminiscence from the fish market

in town—on sunday i go alone.
the gardenias are unwatered

upon my return, the chamomile
unsteeped, toppling odds one over

another over another, but i can
only wring the salt from my sundress

and fill my mouth with brine. i scribble
on soiled parchment—to my husband—

but he will not be home until the ink
bleeds dry. the fish eyes are seething

blind so i sever sinew from bone,
bone carved of alabaster, simmered

and made into stew for a blind man’s
dinner. he will return riding the coattails

of a beer-battered high with not even
counterfeit love to give. i rock

in an armchair and think of this love,
cut from the lining of a singed oyster

shell, this love, wasted. before the
decades drowned themselves

in kerosene, i encountered a man at the
fish market on a sunday who gave

to me a spiraling romance in the ashes.
now, i tear the soft flesh of an apricot

naked from its pit and suck its nectar
from my gaping wounds—do you miss

me as much as i miss you? stranger—
you should see the acropolis i built

for you in my dreams. we are more
and more than this, you said. you

promised me more than a half-baked
existence so where are you now? now,

i lay a gallery of scraps on the beaten
cobblestone and wait for the coyotes

to feast at dusk. they say if the fever
does not kill you the loneliness will.

they say it is easier to play pretend. and
it is not until i have taped cellophane

ghosts to the sills and hung the linen
to dry that i recall—the man from the

fish market i married, but look what
has become of us now. a stranger

now. look—the tides are ever in flux,
shifting. look—i can no longer water

the roots of my saltwater fantasy.
look—how can i con serendipity?

pray that this life—clean, scale, gut—
is only a prototype for the next one.

 

Katie B. Tian is a fifteen-year-old writer from New York and a student at Jericho High School. She has been recognized nationally by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her work. She hopes to share her visions with a larger community through her poetry and prose.

My mother tells me her mother was a refugee,
youth rooted in the Korean divide.
She was plucked, an unripe persimmon still green with potential.

When I stare, I fall into wrinkles—she shifts to hide her smile
peony-plump faces were far too frivolous a good for children of war, already yoked—
war-bred dogs jumping at their backs.

Downstream journeys and stolen 김치, the sun rose and my mother was born
in a Korea-minus-its-other-half. She didn’t want to be plucked,
so she ripened in the grip of repentance and morphine, danced under a tree—
and fled on the undertow of a piano.

Now my last name is Medwin, my eyes are not quite crescent moons.
My father has pupils scarred by a premature birth; Jewish hair curled to the tune of
a 21st Century Schizoid Man. Everything my mother’s mother
wanted him not to be.

In this land of unbridled independents, I see children plucked from cookie-cutter homes,
sutured skin keeping them alive. Petals snatched from dahlia unsuspecting.
I roam with imposters spiraling blood on Chanel bags, taste old money
spliced with a curious blue.

엄마, did you ever cry to your mother like this?
                        will it take playing possum and swimming on seeds of strange fruit
                        to stay alive?

I’m untouched for now—I can indulge in child’s play:
he loves me, he loves me not, without finding withered remains
staining the bottoms of my pretty pink shoes.

I can tattoo the latest fad into my aura, bathe in sweet sound that heals. In dreams of a stationary existence, I’m free from three-headed want, from
plated-peeling wealth. I bloom—the proof of
dahlia stretching to kiss the moon.

 

 

Sara Medwin is a sixteen-year-old poet from Maryland. She enjoys writing journalistically and has contributed to the news source Maryland Matters, but she’s a poet at heart. She firmly believes social media cleanses are the best thing since sliced bread and has an affinity for long, leisurely walks.

the second boy i’ve kissed here with tongue has thinner lips
than the movie tickets i had cut my fingers on to watch

a coming of age flick rated 4.7 stars out of 10. maybe practice
makes perfect but the sessions sure aren’t. i duck into a

corner and hide from sharp eyes who know that showing up
uninvited is only for quarterbacks with skulls crushed into

medals of sophomore-year honor, senior girls with swaying
hips they’d promised a good time yet still deposited here,

shallow apologies shackling their hands. just a little bit of
aloofness is allowed, as a treat — an appetizer only

for boys wrapped in faux leather jackets and painstaking
nonchalance; meanwhile, being present at all makes

people recoil if you’re a negative space in the walls: a
ravenous phantom here to struggle — to sample a

rendezvous that you cannot pronounce, to taste mandated
teenage rebellion and sirens on a school night. and

no, you cannot just take two bites and leave. it’s rude to
the hosts who left before you. so tonight, while i find

crumbling convenience store lipstick to be the only thing
that tastes bearable with stolen alcohol in red plastic,

it kills me to ignore hospitality. i gorge on the tongue of a
third boy and call it an act of grace. serve him dessert

by leaving a crimson lip on his empty beer can. after all,
i can tell he’s starving just from the way he’s here.

 

Grace Liang is a teen writer from Toronto. She enjoys reading fan fiction, watching video essays, sleeping, and playing piano. Find her on Instagram at @yf.grace.