Summer Poems July 2020

I wonder if I am not me but a version of a girl
crowning herself with a clay bucket,
walking one-hundred miles under the sun
while I wait,
soft-skinned,
for a chance to be thirsty.
It is I who cross my legs,
who draw in the bees with my honey walk.
If mine is the scent of womanhood then tell me,
what is it she wears on every fold of her body
when she bears children, and when her children
grow hungry?
Perhaps I am a euphemism of woman,
daughter, writer. Somewhere I should be
being born with heavier shoulders and
a thicker spine,
reigning over long dirt roads and
at night telling stories of white men who
came and left uninvited.

 

 

Mariana Kovalik Silva is an eighteen-year-old poet born and raised in Curitiba, Brazil. Although her first language is Portuguese, she became fluent in English at age fourteen, and has been writing in English ever since.  Mariana writes about finding her voice amidst mental health struggles, and being the first in her family to travel and live abroad.  She hopes to use her writing to inspire others on their healing journeys.

What do you do in the face of cruelty?
Hiroshima — “her skin came off in gloves”
I see the knee on the neck on the asphalt
the indignity, the taste of street, of centuries.
Brutality not my abstraction, but his breath
or lack thereof. The snail shell crushed on
the sidewalk, underneath the giant foot
of my gentle love who walked carelessly
as I do through every conversation, every
impatience, when I cut in line on the day
we evacuated university at the post office
because I believed the line should be organized
otherwise, because I believed myself better,
and I atone — but who’s to say he didn’t?
Truman, the policeman. But harm is harm
and in a sense we must give up the question
of evil (and not because it is intractable) —
it is irrelevant: we only confront suffering. No
policy solution, no neat conclusion, only the
birdsong, the smell of hot jasmine, heady
in the early summer heat. We are blessed
with imperfect memories, a birdlike darting
attention. Even maimed, we (some, like me,
only spiritually) can only suffer for so long.

 

 

Avital Balwit studies political and social thought and cognitive science at the University of Virginia. She writes short stories, personal essays, and poetry. She has been a finalist in essay contests for The New York Times and The Economist, and she won the Atlantic’s 2020 instagram poetry contest.

Like this:

Trees snap wetly beneath the weight of
night falling. Blood orange sun springs citrus
between limbs, bleeding
into smog-filled
skyline: perfume that reads, “Apocalypse.

I see this from the back porch, breathing too-still
air. Each breath lodges like little stones,
rattling with each swallow. Like a pocket watch
stuffed down twisting trachea.

One two. Tick tock.
I gasp – like clockwork.
Asphyxiation is equal to midnight.

We have brought this upon ourselves.
Night falls face first, never gets up again.

 

 

Brandon Kim is a rising senior currently attending Culver City High School. An alumnus of the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, the Iowa Young Writers Studio and the Medill-Northwestern Journalism Institute, he has been awarded in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards and Letters about Literature. He is the editor-in-chief of his school newspaper The Centaurian and a reader for Polyphony Lit. He also serves as editor-in-chief for his literary magazine, YAWP, which he co-founded. Brandon is an avid hiker and lives in Culver City with his family.

 

Far from here, it is July
An ephemeral summer; one in which I gaze at the water tower
and wish my thirst had the strength to scale it
I watched the old man yesterday,
watched him make a church out of himself
in the afternoon’s bluing light
He held a gun in his hand like your father used to,
let his eyes glaze over as the Thursday evening ads
droned a cacophony behind him
From my spot in his rose bushes—
two thorns wound into my left thigh,
the smell of pesticide thick—
I listened to the megachurch downtown advertise
a very special Sunday brunch

It reminded me of that one bleary afternoon where we skipped religion class,
when I felt sunsick and you decided you wanted to understand
the devotion of the original faithful,
to understand how people hollowed out their whole lives for one man
We tore out a picture of an aging divorce attorney
from my mother’s copy of the yellow pages,
taped him on my wall and stared at him
in his faded, jaundiced glory
You told me to imagine we were praying to him and I did
It was springtime, and you were laughing,
and the cherry blossoms were blooming outside
You said that you would never understand religion,
but I said that I understood where it came from

If I would become hollow for anyone,
it would be you

 

Allison Lowe is a rising high school junior from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has previously been published in Polyphony Lit, Same Faces Collective, and The Loud Journal. She has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and Hollins University.

girls  perched bayside     shedding
masks onto pebbles.  drag fingers,
lick ripple, splash  dirty off  mishaven
legs.         who made night  turn to wolf?
who thumbed        foam into waves?
they slip,  half-cast in     shallows,
black manes haloing  their bodies.
a mist  settles;  crested reflections
blur        into mosaics. remember
palms pressing        waists.  remember
sighs dancing  on lips. when the
fog  lifts, the girls        are gone.

 

Emma Miao attends high school in Vancouver, BC. Her work appears in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Emerson Review, Sine Theta Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, and Eunoia Review, among others. A Commended Foyle Young Poet 2019, she is a poetry reader for Up the Staircase Quarterly and the co-founder and executive editor of Surging Tide Magazine, a Vancouver-based online literary magazine dedicated to empowering youth voices. She is recognized by the Poetry Society UK and the Poetry Institute of Canada. Tweet her @emmaamiao.