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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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July 2021

My Therapist Wants to Know How I Do in the Mornings

By Mayowa Oyewale

after Tiana Clark

 

“I”?

I founder.

I fall from the sky of dream. I grab

bedsheets like they are

parachutes. I gasp. I gasp nightmare

into dawn. I thrash about in blue dark,

scramble for my phone. I can’t write

on paper. I write what I remember

on a notebook app — most times, I remember

nothing. For a long time, I close my eyes &

hope for memory. For a long time,

time passes.

In a next room, my

mother is yelling at God

in her sleep. I close my ears & open

my eyes to light feeding the curtains.

I open my mind to the moment &

the movement of myself.

I wrestle between being broken & being

torn. I turn off airplane mode &

messages pour. Angry

WhatsApp messages. Preaching WhatsApp messages.

E-mails. I skip the

unfortunatelys. I read. I read.

I highlight Tranströmer: I’m awake and don’t know where I am.

I envy that [his] life finally returns, envy

any name that appears like an

angel. I sprawl. I spread

into a pool & ponder. I ponder.

I wonder why some hands can hold hope

when some cannot even hold themselves. I curse

inward.

I write sgshjsnsnshdhdbbd.

I cross out sgshjsnsnshdhdbbd.

Bach. The Art of Fugue. I lie

on the bed, I sup the song.

I haven’t spoken yet, can go

a whole month without a mouth.

In the bathroom, I sing.

Hymn until lather fills my mouth. Here, I mourn

the morning before the bird. I know this morning like

I have known all mornings. I, too, like

how they look like hope. But God,

I hoard too much night.

 

 

Mayowa Oyewale writes poetry from Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he currently studies Literature-in-English at Obafemi Awolowo University. A poetry reader at Chestnut Review, he Instagrams @mayowaoyewale__

Silence: Our New Language

By Najeeb Yusuf Ubandiya

God has a photograph of this:
We survive years of wilderness.

A man from the neighbourhood
Keeps us acquaintance,
With guns at [both] hands—
Aimed at the tunnels of our nostrils.

Silence is our new language,
Our weeps fly as idioms and phrases
Round the deafened ears of the world—
In shape of teardrops
While mother nature laughs at us

Coughing up the dust in her mouth;
Another multi-coloured wind sweeps in.

 

 

Najeeb Yusuf Ubandiya is a young poet from Nigeria. He is a loner who writes to find out what he thinks and feels—about himself and the world around him—and to keep his purpose awake and breathing.His works have appeared in Ngiga Review and Blue Marble Review.

 

 

On loving red

By Sarah Cavar

Red thoughts thick with a steamghost sizzle
Prego bubble bursts in time
with stovetop midnights. We stuck
our heads & hands in drive
-through holes in hopes
in gas-stove smoke alight
in summer-houses, made of helium
we are laughter over flame. Melt
into sand between her sofa-cracks
a cherry bowl amid our legs.
Return to red, or so it seems: one single bowl
of suckled pits.

 

 

Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. Author of two chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press) and THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), they have also had work in Bitch Magazine, Electric Literature, The Offing, Luna Luna Magazine, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Cavar navel-gazes at cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.

take one two or three times a day as needed

By Amy Wolstenholme

it’s so easy to say
i’m so lost

the phrase slips out when i’m alone
in waiting rooms or by the lake,

i don’t understand the reflection of my face
in the reception window or in the water,

i’m so lost
is not the same as
              i don’t know where i am

 i know i sit in a blue chair or on green grass,
i know the bend of my legs,
i know each inescapable breath of this little body, but

the receptionist pops out to say
go through

and i’ve already gone without knowing,
i’m by the lake in waiting rooms,

staring at my own face and wondering

              i’m so lost,
is not the same as
this can’t be real

but it’s close

the door of the doctor’s room
holds a name I don’t know, and

there’s no pill that says
                 i know you
                 and you’re found

 

Amy Wolstenholme is a scientist by day and a poet by night, originally from the beautiful Jurassic Coast. Whether slicing up a genome or carving out a stanza, her work comes from a place of awe and love for the natural world. Her recent works can also be found in Visual Verse, Crow & Cross Keys and in several places on the Young Poets Network. She can be found at @AmyWolstenholm3 on Twitter.

Our Hometown

By Christian Ash

In our hometown there were places––Real places: like the Taco Bell Burger King McDonald’s trifecta, where if we went late enough we could sometimes see the employees lighting up and smoking underage under parking lot streetlights; and the beat-up other Walgreens, where a big can of Arnold Palmer and a family size bag of those pretzels bites with the peanut butter inside only cost two seventy-nine in exact change; and the church/daycare parking lot where we used to play four-square and had our own ass handed to us again and again by merciless middle school boys who found puberty early and used it to cherry bomb that motherfucker so hard we didn’t have a cold chance in hell; and that secret bike trail that wasn’t really secret and is now an apartment complex haunted by the souls of Baja Blast-drinking sixteen-year-old jackasses pulling wheelies on their ghostly 12-speeds; and the old basketball court that stood next to the high school until orcish men wielding hard-hats and jackhammers came and tore it up to build a brick building with no windows and no doors, that black asphalt and triple-rimmed hoop now long, long gone—the faded white three-point arc and games of twenty-one existing only in memory like the taste of a root beer float; and let’s not forget the football bleachers so stereotypical I don’t need to remind you they had a specified section solely for the hopeless souls of pep band kids with braces and baritones, ADHD and saxophone reeds, converse kicks and splintery drumsticks, lonely oboes and sheet music with penciled-in quotes from Seneca, etc., etc.––those bleachers underneath which the virginities of many were (supposedly) lost, along with something else we didn’t even know we had but now we miss it like those Scooby-Doo fruit snacks that turned out to be too good for reality; and of course that hill behind the Honeywell smokestack, where once on an October midnight before the end of the world we licked cheap McDonald’s ice cream cones in the backseat of a beater, and for the first time saw our lives as bildungsromans building up to this exact moment, saw the honey-colored spirit egress not just with the smoke of Marlboros or blunts or bonfires, but with each new and frosting exhalation.

 

And now when we find ourselves back in our hometown, it’s just a town that used to be home.

 

 

Christian Ash was born and raised in suburban Minnesota, and currently attends Gustavus Adolphus College. In 2020, his fiction and poetry received awards as part of the Lawrence Owen Prizes in Creative Writing. Additionally, his work has been published in Kaleidzine Magazine and Firethorne Literary and Graphic Magazine.

2050

By Lydia Hessel-Robinson

Maeve traipses home, sweat pouring down her back. March wasn’t this warm when Mommy was a girl. No,— soft, cold flakes of snow blanketed the ground. At least, that’s what Mommy said.

Past the playground, children who don’t get a future. Past the two saplings. They never last; why does the city bother anymore? People drive under solar panels, coming home from jobs that are supposed to save the environment. But everybody will die within twenty years. Those jobs came too late. At least, that’s what the scientists said.

She doesn’t have any ambitions. Nothing matters if the water is going to swallow her whole. Or maybe she’ll shrivel up like a sun-dried tomato. At least she has twenty years to find her final words. There, that’s an ambition.

Her battered house leans on a useless little hill. She swings the swollen door open, watermarks higher each year. It’s a growth chart just like the one Mommy keeps for her. The water grows faster.

Mommy drags in the groceries, wearing her Yale shirt as if a fancy degree will protect her. She wants Maeve to attend Yale, but how can she if Connecticut drowned years ago?

“Maeve, a little help.”

Into the garage, heave bags to the kitchen. 75% recycled material, one bag brags. Oh, that’s the minimum, retorts another. 84%, how’s that! Food is stocked, one more week to live in Dumpster World. Maybe Maeve can find a clean planet all for herself. Ambition number two.

The sun disappears, a breeze kicks up. Mommy frowns.

“That’s weird. Storms weren’t predicted today.”

Maeve shivers. The storms are more often these days, Maeve overheard Daddy say one night. What will we do when the house floods? Where will we go?

Now the rain patters on the windows. It’s almost pleasant, except for Daddy’s words creeping up behind Maeve, ready to pounce if she gets too comfortable.

The rain turns into a tantrum. Dying trees lash the house, people duck through doors, and the wind howls. It’s never this bad. Mommy and Daddy hold Maeve close when she crawls into their bed that night.

In the morning, there is no sun, only wind and rain. The next day, too, and the next. Maeve stays upstairs because downstairs is a swimming pool.

On day six, no power.

Day ten, nothing to eat.

Day thirteen, no Mommy. No Daddy. It wasn’t twenty years, scientists. It wasn’t twenty years. She’s alone, words half-said, lost in water before she could finish.

 

 

Lydia Hessel-Robinson is a high school freshman in the Philadelphia area. Her work has previously been published in Philadelphia Stories, Jr., and Cricket magazine. She also loves to read and competes in horseback riding.

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