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.

 

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.