Winter Poems 2020

 

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.

 

for the brother/sister I never met

 

as always, Ma kneels by her bed

and offers a prayer to dawn, slipping

through the curtains the way millions

of babies crawl into her dreams at night.

 

pray harder, my mother opens her chest

to the sky, always waiting for two hands

to dig through the clouds and press

her lost life      right back into her.

 

you were all we expected, not the car

that crashed into ours, not Pa telling us

to stay inside, not Ma hunched over

on the side holding her stomach, not you

 

bleeding out of her. I still see your footprints

everywhere, the lonely crib that swings by the window,

the sea of red you drowned in, your name’s etched into

the walls of this empty not empty not empty    house.

 

Spencer Chang is a high school junior from Taipei, Taiwan. In his spare time, Spencer enjoys reading, dancing in his bedroom, and dreaming about traveling the world.

 

I read a poem last night and now I shed

rhymes from my head like hair. Lose line breaks

in boar bristles. Tear out syntax in

pure frustration.

 

That poem is the reason

today I have sonnets

fluttering loose

wherever I go. In the afternoon,

I sit and braid stanzas together,

and the sunlight makes even

the mistakes look nice, those

knots I can’t seem

to unravel, that my fingers

get caught in when I run them

through a song.

 

This always

happens. You would think

I would learn not to eat

poetry before bed, maybe drink

a glass of warm milk instead–

but I rather like the sensation

of sound across my scalp

and untangling metaphors

the next morning. We all

have our vices.

 

Miranda Sun is twenty years old. An alumna of the NYS Summer Young Writers Institute and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, as well as nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Recent publications include Body Without Organs, Lammergeier, Red Queen, and more. She is a former editorial assistant for Ninth Letter Online and loves the Monterey Bay Aquarium. You can find her procrastinating on Twitter @msunwrites or roaming the streets of Chicago in search of bubble tea.