Summer 2025

For the seventeen years of my existence, I’ve counted fireflies like
Lines on my fingers. Waded in the marsh.
Sat below the dogwood, bed of grass, teeth crushing a Cut
of honeysuckle, fingers sticky-pink from the sap
Sat on that bed of grass, I peered out past the thick weeds.
Beyond the bayou, beyond the bridge,
I snuck a glance at it—that white-sand kingdom.
Sand-people with sand-hair, and
Pillars of blood-and-blue stitched flags,
Worshiping nighttime bursts of fae lightning—ruby, beetle-indigo.
There, I waded the stream, fingers blistered green by ivies.
Toes nibbled by the brownback minnow.
When I looked out, past the bridge, past the bayou,
My teeth curled. Wanting.

Peach-palm girls with bleached hair and jaguars,
Sunkissed skin, denim blessings, Daddy’s money.
Golden-haired boys, summer shorts, pin-needle hair.
Whataburger after football games, confetti-blessings at homecoming.

My fingers sticky from marsh-melon sap, yours
Sticky from patty-melts, gooey cheese dripping down your chin,
Coke in one hand, burger in the other.

 

Kyra Ezikeuzor is a high school senior from Texas. For her poetry, she has been awarded the National American Voices Medal from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She has been recognized by Princeton University’s Creative Writing Department, published in the America Library of Poetry, and honored with the National Creative Writing Book Award from Hollins University. Inspired by her heritage, and her favorite poets Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka, Kyra enjoys writing poetry and short stories about nature, culture, and memory. Besides writing, she loves dancing, taking morning walks, and journaling.

I
remember the day Spelman 47 was
boxed up. We only became ready
by remembering that all you need to
eat a box of pasta is four friends. Kick
the habit of walking over. From my
place to yours is seven million feet
now, or nine. I will bring extra shoes with
me. I will hand deliver letters. A joy
is returning Sully’s stolen book while
a shared custody ring goes back to you,
and know this: however hard I tried
to get out of bed then is nothing compared to
now. Everyone is too far. You figure
one day soon we will make it back out
of this phone trap. I’m not sure in what
direction: Brownsville south or Tommy north
or the green west. Maybe June’s name will be Dakota
by then. Of course there’s New York and
D.C. and, on the condition of forgiveness, Oregon.
Won’t it be special to have had
these whisperings out loud again in
a room which is small, but common?

 

Mollika Jai Singh is a poet from San Diego and MoCo and an MFA candidate in Bloomington, Indiana. They write with an impulse to commit to a few words and write between the lines. Mollika studies the (self-)representation of people of color in popular culture, gendered and racial performance, carework, and love and desire across differences. Find her on Twitter @mollikajaisingh.

I am a body of many seasons.
Today, I am pliant, poured like honey
into the sun’s open jaw,
armpits sugared with sweat,
legs shaved raw and pink,
the wind kissing me greedy, relentless.

Tomorrow, I will be stiff.
The air will whisper cardigan, whisper retreat,
and I will listen. I will shrink into myself,
womb heavy with the secret ache of womanhood,
spine curving like a sickle moon.

Now a girl beside me at the museum
renders an ichthyosaurus, bone by bone,
a ghost inside the machine, vertebrae flickering into form.
I watch its body unearth itself from code and light
and think — how sure it must be,
to exist only in hindsight.

On the way back, She’s Always a Woman
spills through my headphones, and suddenly—autumn
burnt leaves curling through a cracked window,

though spring is still impossible, undecided
its face a different shape each morning;
one foot in the Triassic, one in the thawing future.

I walk past the upper campus brick houses,
their chimneys raised like fists against the wind,
and feel myself unstitching from time,
like the hem of a too-worn shawl,
so much the way my body is not the body it was yesterday,
my skin stretching, swelling—
woman today, something else tomorrow.

Maybe the season will settle before I do.
Maybe neither of us were meant to.

 

Indiana Plant is a freshman and Eccles Scholar at the University of Utah, where she is studying applied economics and anthropology. Her poetry has been published by The Palouse Review, Sink Hollow, Live Poets Society of New Jersey, Blue Marble Review (hi again!), and Scripto Literary Magazine. She has received an Honorable Mention in the Penguin Random House U.S. Creative Writing Awards.

My body is my problem, my greatest joy,
My torment, my project, my most prized possession.
Something I fight with, withholding it fuel- leaving the tank
Empty and sputtering for oil.

I love it, I jeer at it, I starve it- let my ribs
Poke through and
Fat melt through my skin and out of me,
Like was through cloth.

Sometimes I cherish it, show it off as if I were
A delicate chandelier,
Rosy glass and sweet, soft light.
Sometimes I let it be seen by hungry eyes, then snatch it
Away.

My body, my prop,
My eternal companion.

 

Chloe Parekh is a sophomore at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, New York. Last summer she attended Bard College Young Writer’s Workshop and the Interlochen Intensive Novel Writing Program. During Summer 2023, she attended Oxford Summer Courses in Philosophy. She is a recipient of Scholastic Art & Writing ’25 Gold and Silver Keys in both Poetry and Painting. Her poetry has appeared in Apprentice Writer (Spring ’25), the Young Writer’s Anthology (Boston, Spring ’24), American High School Poets ’24, and Poetic Power: A Celebration of Poets ’24. Her poem ‘Summertimes’ won the ‘Once Upon a Dream’ Award from Young Writers USA. She will attend The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop this summer and the Polyphony Lit Summer Editing Apprenticeship. When not writing poetry, she enjoys spending time with friends, taking long walks and exploring her surroundings and drawing at home in Brooklyn.

what else to start fires with? I’ve been busy
dropping every other word to echo your accent.
busy looking down at the river instead
of out. Sometimes I forget
that you can have turtles, too. brushfires,
orange skies. Railroads and love confessions
and metaphors.

Later, I ask you why we remember the rain
when we hadn’t seen it. I guess I have been running
guess I only care for the awnings shielding me
from it. you good? We stayed in the back that night.

what else? I’ve been brushstroke-oriented
since I met you. You grin in every shade of blue. Photos
with you in it that blur your face. I hold down,
your laugh shades the background all sorts of hues.
What else? your voice lilts, lights. Like a name
can be an apocalypse. A figure swooping bluebird-like
hill-landing. I should’ve known you were serious
because you kept holding the flash and didn’t once ask us
to take one of you in return. we have so little time. you hold affection
in tangerine segments, tell me you understand the metaphors.
the humidity. breath in your throat. I move gently,
hazy, wear complementary colors.

 

Noralee Zwick is a student and poet based in the Bay Area, California. A California Arts Scholar and Iowa Young Writers Studio alum, their work can be found in Aster Lit, Prairie Home Magazine, and Polyphony Lit, among others.

Night is a cloudless canopy,
a shy moon hesitating above the peak.
Your phone light spills white on the cow path,
a radiant brink ahead
Swaying with purple needlegrass,
your black cast wrapped around your hobbling foot.

The chirpy doctor told you “four weeks”
until you could don your half-torn leather glove.
“What about my plan?” you asked,
beating balls, sweating your way to Division One.
Now, you’re an alien, wobbling up a foreign hill,
not chasing the silver golf ball, not chasing anything.
You’re without your coconut sunscreen, your strawberry electrolytes,
without your golf bag heavy around your shoulders—
Who are you?

You stand on the rocky outcropping,
hovering above the clover-green horizon,
where pink watercolor is smeared below a bright balloon.
The poppied terrain ahead is dotted with clusters of
rhinestone lights tucked into the kneaded hills.

You imagine the galaxy beyond, clusters of colorful marbles,
balls of sparking energy circling and colliding, each farther than the last—
The dark indifferent closet expands to infinity, ripping through the void—
and you briefly fear the crushing grip of the cosmos.

But maybe someone out there is looking back,
like you, feeling significantly insignificant,
a speck in the universe, wandering on a floating rock.
But it’s not all lost. It’s your duty to navigate the fairway ahead
and find your place among the stars.

 

Nathan Lee lives in San Ramon, California and is currently attending Dougherty Valley High School.