Winter Poems 2020

My mom says your body

Took its last breath when I was young,

And if it weren’t for the

Boxes of photographs

And presents that she says you

Gave me on my birthday

I wouldn’t have even remembered that you

Were once around me.

That your fingerprints were once

Smudged on my kitchen table

or that you once breathed the air of the

Same earth I live on now.

My memories of you don’t exist in my head.

They hang on the walls and

Hide in the pancakes

My mom says you always fed her in the morning.

And it saddens me how unfamiliar you look

Through the picture frame

With your arms wrapped around my small body,

Probably feeling so warm,

Probably calling me granddaughter,

Not knowing that I will never be able to remember

Your smiling face on my own.

 

Mara Magarahan is a High School Creative Writing student from Chester County Pennsylvania, who can be found writing poetry anywhere at any time, even if that means scribbling on napkins or writing on her hands. She is the author of the poetry collection I’ll Be Okay, which was published in September of 2018. Recently, her work has been published in Bridge Ink’s literary magazine’s 3.5 issue. Mara finds inspiration from her life experiences and uses writing as both a coping skill and a way to connect with others. She wants readers to feel like they are experiencing the world through her eyes and mind.

 

Its funny that clocks

Actually used to tick.

Mom’s in the hospital.

Tick tock.

I am attempting to sleep

In my Amish neighbors house.

Tick tock.

 

Whiffs of day old shoo fly pie

still float through the air.

And I can’t shoo away thoughts

Of cold linoleum, and IV needles.

Tick tock.

I lay on a too warm bed

Sheets kicked around my feet.

Tick tock.

 

My heavy eyes

can’t seem to close.

I never doubted she

would come back fine.

Tick tock.

I can’t sleep

But not because of mom.

Tick tock.

Stupid clock.

 

 

Annabelle Liechty is a student living outside of Philadelphia. She enjoys singing, reading, and drowning in her schoolwork. Sometimes when she feels emotionally distraught she poems.

 

Yesterday a girl asked me if I would be married by eighteen—No, maybe, yes, if you

really insist,

     I have already begun making rings out of scotch tape, and by eighteen

     someone will be slipping them onto my thumbs

          (made easy with wet indigo gouache).

(or maybe it is not pigment but bruising, some slow purpling dripping from my fingers to

yours.)

Three Thanksgivings ago I shut myself into my room and cried and when my parents

asked why

     I said it was because I missed my grandmother (it was because I didn’t like the

guests).

     This year the girl had a blue tang on her forearm and the sticker was mine

          (I was saving it)

     I don’t like Thanksgivings anymore.

I wonder if by marriage I will be skilled enough to be able to sew

     blue tangs into my skin so no one can take them,

     like my grandmother did when she etched all the jujubes

          her stepmother never let her eat

     into brown spots on her hands, all the

     untrue words my grandfather said about her into lines on her forehead (then she

planted the heartache in her body and

          died from it)

I think, I am just three maotais away

     from enlightenment, three broken bodies and a tapestry tree

I think, I am dressed wrong—this scarf does not go with my skin and neither does the

tablecloth

     I am turning a bit red, you see, from red bean beads (of sweat, I think) and

          speckled mango skin

(To paint it in pretty words, they call it the glow, as if we are lightbulbs)

I am turning a bit red and a bit blue (for lack of air) and so a bit purple,

     like the day my mother cried because she lost her mother and I had to fake

my tears

     to pretend that I could still cry over it, when really they had all dried up

          in my eyes like gouache eventually does and

I think she probably wanted to see me get married but she never did

     and she never will.

 

Rachel Zhu lives in New York and is currently a junior at Horace Mann School. She is the cofounder and Editor in Chief of Horace Mann’s creative prose magazine, LitMag. Outside of school, Zhu writes creative short prose and poetry, and is also an artist and ceramicist. She draws influence from her Chinese background and culture as well as classical European and American works of literature. Through her work, she hopes to inspire other Asian Americans to express their stories and experiences through the world of humanities and art.

The last I saw Dad I didn’t know it was the last.

Buildings in San Francisco are on roads like hills like mountains
and the roads at home are just, roads.
Mom’s commute
the MTA off-schedule
scheduling for check-ups
for chemo
for follow-ups to the check-ups,
blood drawn.

Mom draws families like trees.
Branches fall in winter and no one minds.

Dad’s branch fell in August, and the hills
that were like roads
fell too,
fell flat,
and dull,
and took tears to the gutter.

Where he pretended to sew the scattered ashes:
that man from Georgia, who knew the
Mom from Georgia,

Soon
She and I, one two,
became
three
became
six
became
—wait.

Siblings or
not siblings or
not blood but
some love.

And as alone
so together.

Like branches in winter,
like lines on roads that
drift past the rows of houses
which stand above cornfields
and blow like leaves
in the summer
and fall in winter
the next branch fell
in May.

When he crossed
the lines in the road,
no hills but

six became
three became
two     one, just

Me.
and mom.

Two branches that never fell.
Two branches evergreen.
Like check-ups
or trains,
on schedule,
on time.

But time doesn’t wait.
and the clock is just running
until
the next branch
falls.

And no new seeds are dropping
And these branches won’t regrow.

Will Leggat is a high school senior from Brooklyn, New York. He attends Phillips Academy Andover, where he is the editor-in-chief of his school’s literary magazine, The Courant, and a Prose Reader for The Adroit Journal. When he’s not writing, editing, or riding the Q Train, he’s drinking a bit too much coffee.

I asked if this lebensraum of furtive

memory could house my body//they said

no//that they can not withstand//my

mother’s wrath//that I am a conch//only

meant to kiss the salty sea at sunset.

 

they said in contorted clamours that every

sad face//is sculpted from the same sorry

clay.//I said no//that our demons are

composite of different debris//that

happiness is a place//and some people are

homeless//like birds//when trees are felled.

 

then they asked for an exchange//of my

body//for a droplet of nirvana.//I said no//

that we all become water at the journey’s end//

at sunset//and this house is not for sale.

 

Oni Tomiwa is a lover of poetry. A lover of every form of art and an amateur nature photographer. He resides and writes in Osogbo, Osun State. His poems and essays have appeared in both prints and journals. He also loves football.

Being offered drugs / is like being bullied into sentience—the body’s brain douses itself / in cold-water neurons, their electric singe / kneading muscles into a pit, blood slow, at attention, everything alert / with the adrenaline of a waiting decision, and so / it’s the waiting that hurts.

 

 

 

Aubre is a current junior in high school, spending all of her money on energy drinks. She’s had her work published in Appelley Publishing’s 2018 Rising Stars Collection, Apricity Press, and a few school publications.