Summer Poems/July 2019

You like me
You like my purple hair
You like how my head barely bumps your chin
You like when I borrow your shirts
You like how on a hot day I’ll peel off my socks and jump in the lake
You like how ticklish my scarred knees are
You like the goldfish-shaped birthmark on my back
You like how my eyelashes brush your cheek
You like the faces I make as I read a book
You like how I avoid the cracks in the sidewalk
You like when I blast the bass in your truck
You like how I grab your hand and don’t let go
You like to steal fries from my plate
You like kissing each one of my freckles
You like how I call your name out
You like me

 

Sarah is a senior at Marcellus High School in central New York. She loves to paint and watch hockey with her grandfather.

Colors drip off your
fingertips like rain
drips off trees
after the clouds have gone.
Red reminds me of soft
touches and flushed cheeks,
of shared smiles and
quick glances.
Blue reminds me of the
cover of Macbeth,
open to show your
scribbled mess of black underlines
and notes and question marks.
I remember your hand writing steadily
beside me and
the whispered jokes that
float across the couch to me.
Green reminds me of
the hula girl that swayed
on your dashboard as you
took me to the botanical gardens.
Of the dollar bills that spilled
out of your pocket
to pay for books you knew
you’d never read.
Of your favorite shirt.
I remember your fingers running
through your sandy hair while you
drank black
coffee until the sun came up.
It was yellow, the day we decided to end it, the sun
coming in through the windows,
teasing us.

 

Mallory Schirm is a junior English major at Birmingham-Southern College. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Southern Academic Review, an editor of the student magazine, and a Writing Center tutor. Although she prefers the literary aspect of the English major, she has just began to dabble in creative writing.

my house sat
lost in sight between
the palm trees
planted by mother
in her mid-thirties

I was like my father
venturing to lands without moving a muscle
each page was a new journey
to a strange land

I was sly
wondering
if I was who I am
or if I was who I wanted to be

I was like other boys
trapped in a world
where the sun
like a hummingbird
rises and floats away

I learn the faces of numbers
bodies to explore and tuck
I am an archaeologist
I dig and reason and find
history in whatever the earth
has swallowed

but one day      a girl stands outside
of my house     a blooming hibiscus
standing in the rain     removing glasses
from my eyes

I can still see it
underneath the palm tree
I changed
not even the palm tree noticed

 

Jaewon Chang is a high school sophomore in the Philippines. He enjoys solving math problems and traveling the city on foot. His lifetime goal is to meet mathematicians and poets.

From the top of the lifeguard stand the world is
Pink skies and tan boys, is
Water, smiles.
She sits next to me, my best friend. Sixteen.
Ice cream melts in friendship bracelets
Down our wrists.
“Did you know they say you can see
The Milky Way here? It’s, like, the only place
Left in the country.”
Soft. “Who’s they?”
Beat. “My dad, I guess.”
I wipe my hand on the new sweatshirt.
Sticky. She considers this, watching the boys
Dive into the water a last time.
Dripping. “I wonder why.”
Fragments. “Light pollution.”
We speak in driftwood moments.
They strike empty pits in our stomachs
Like the last texts of the night.
Together. Not so.
Alone. “We have to be back.”
Down. “Almost dark anyway.”
The ghost crabs scatter at our ankles
In cell phone light.
Tomorrow will be better.
Tomorrow we will see the Milky Way before
Sunrise.

 

Zoe-Aline Howard is a Kernersville, NC local and early college graduate entering her college years with an Associate of Arts and high, high hopes. Beyond studying forms of poetry and reading fiction, she enjoys creating digital zines. In the fall, she will declare herself a Pre-Creative Writing major at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and begin her literary journey in full force.

 

 

I dreamt that I must swaddle a baby—
that his head was as fragile as an egg
and inside me was the seed of terror
smothering my heart with the deed of this body
the paperwork all there
that suffocating ownership that he
and I both shared—
mine and his, belonging to no one but each other.

Where was my mother
as I stared into the blank black eyes
of this child
his face too bright
like a pink planet tipped back into the embrace of a star?

Where was my mother
to teach me
how to cradle the yolk inside the skull?
How to live with this new object?

She was scared as well,
I know, alone in her hometown
she burnt my leg on a clothes-iron
and tried to say sorry a thousand different ways.

Just like the bee sting at the bay house
how the smell of palm-tree breeze and linen
carried me through the pain.
And now I forget the exact taste of it in my mouth.

I must now carry this body
through his life,
through his pain
in a dream world where the sky
is crumpled paper and rain and fire
and my child will be buried in snow
before I wake.

Norah Brady is an actor, writer, and space enthusiast living in Boston, Massachusetts with two cats and many, many books. She feels most at home at Latin conventions or walking through the woods, searching for the unknown. Her poetry and short fiction works can be found in Rookie magazine, Write the World’s 2017 collection: Young Voices Across the Globe, and the Ekphrastic Review. Her work has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

The Notre Dame Cathedral burned down. My friend looks bored in his picture with it and I will never be able to take a better one. The Twin Towers exploded before I was born. The Appalachians are shrinking and the ice caps are melting and Everest grows higher and less attainable every day and I want to travel the world but what if, when I’m ready, it’s not there anymore?

 

a fire slowly

swallows my religion while

people are singing

 

 

Greta Starling is a teenage writer. She enjoys reading and writing; some of her favorite books are by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli. Her favorite poets are William Shakespeare and Natasha Tretheway. Follow her on Instagram at @greta_writes.