November Poems 2022

If I close my eyes hard enough they hurt, I can pretend all I know is that vitreous
summer. No grass, no sand and shells, only the soreness from staring down at choices

for too long. On those yellow-lined roads, we walked, prayers drying on our tongues,
our shorts papery, palms sticking to each other. Big words, bubble-blown at the moon.

School kissed our foreheads. The trees wouldn’t shake, but they’d smile with the wind. If only
my parents knew that laughing felt like the right way of being ripped apart. Maybe then, there

wouldn’t have been so much swallowing. The air was streaked with our sweat—proof
that we were real besides the rusted taxis slowing down for our hands. Here are

testaments to how summer spat us up naked: telling the part-time lady we were eighteen or older
and howling. Fishing for silences to fill the cavity of two digits. Flapping our arms to fly home.

After that, the bugs began. They didn’t buzz or trill—they cried. Especially the cicadas, God,
could they cry. Voices awkward and hoarse like they had a better sound lodged in their throat.

It’s half past yesterday and my room is the hill a star chose to die on, lit frantically from the inside
out. The TV is an assortment of hair colors & they move so fast. I can see the protesting outline of

our breaths against the breeze. I’m leaving soon, for good, and when I’m not here anymore—I can’t be
begging summer to open back up. It’d be a special shame, being welcomed into my own home. So I lift

my head and try to stomach the busy air. I pluck the traffic cones from the incessant construction
sites and wear them like ornaments on my shirts. I lunge and yank the stars down, replace them

with satellites. I’m too scared to exhale any color but gray. And in all the useless gaps in my body, I bear
the pale lie that we were bobbing for breath together, the intersections of our time a rakish grin of hope.

Arim Lee is a high school student based in Andover and Seoul. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Writers, The Harvard Crimson, The Fitzgerald Museum, Smith College, and more. She founded and reads for CHINCHILLA LIT, as well as The Courant, The Hanok Review, and Polyphony Lit. In her free time, she enjoys listening to the same song over and over again (right now it’s Mido and Falasol’s “Superstar”).

I tell the boy I like my AP Chinese score
and he’s saying it’s good enough. Neither of us
heeds the elephant. I say I was raised by dragons
and he flounders, too stiff-jointed to word his
doubts. Beyond every unlikely conversation is the
elementary school we forsook in Brooklyn, which
is to say that I’m a reminiscencer. Cultural cringe is
why I go back to the same people, why I walk
backwards on the double helix to pick up all the
mirrored strands of nucleotides, why I must prove
my loyalty to generations of long-gone forebears
and the land they left behind. In the distance,
Lianjiang’s tea mountains and the waterfalls of Minhou.
The ground I first learned to walk on now lost. In
sleepless city, I rename my hometown and forget the
blood I once begged for after a plane ride. It’s border
selectivity that divides: the eagle on the cover of my
passport, the unforgiving tongue of the green card
that says I will never be yours. For once, I want to be
licit, a crossbreed written under a genus, a known
existence. Let me burn agarwood for those who came
before. Even this incense can be known as eaglewood.

Sandra Lin (林诺晨) is a Chinese American from New York who currently attends Bell High School in Florida. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Art and Writing, Rider University, and Hollins University, among others. Sandra is working on a platform that aims to empower marginalized voices in literature. She may be contacted on Instagram @sandranuochen

one bed: empty
sheets folded over the mass of pillows, still.
one bedroom
with too many remnants.
one house, one person — one hollow silence.

[
my little sister sings along to songs
in our deserted kitchen.
what’s the word for missing something
before it’s gone?
beads of rain batter themselves
against the window glass.
in tiny reflections of silver globes,
i see an infinity of worlds.
drops inside my pupils inside a drop
of rain. they are as black as a funeral trenchcoat.
]

grief does not feel like sadness.
instead, a black hole swallows
and collapses everything
into the grave
of a star.
it is everything and nothing
existing in the same impossible core,
stinging like a stone, and bitter. velvet
and oil pool down the walls
of your throat.
grief is the absolute presence of nothing
in a space
where something
should be.

Amelia Glass is seventeen years old and wishes she wasn’t. She loves plants, her two sisters, and the cool mist after it rains. She is currently a junior at Lone Peak High School. thinking on the meaning of the word ‘gone’ is her first published piece.

In another life, I would wear helmets every day. My mother watches Twilight so she can fall asleep. When my sister dreams of vegetables, they are already diced. My father watches cobra hunters on TV when he can’t fall asleep. They pull up floorboards. They kick empty tires. Tomorrow, my father will have open heart surgery. Tonight, I hear my neighbors that I have never seen. They could be playing snakes and ladders. They could be surgeons or dice makers. Have you ever lived inside of a die? The dice maker who was once a jeweler asks the mirror. The jeweler who was once a dice maker says yes.

Rigel Portales is a twenty-year-old Filipino poet afraid of disappearing. Fortunately, his works have appeared/are soon to appear on Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, and Cha with a poetry chapbook, DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN, forthcoming from FlowerSong Press in the US. He’s currently poetry editor at the Malate Literary Folio. You can find him on his Twitter account @rijwrites where he writes to preserve and preserves to write.