Winter Poems 2022

today and i didn’t plan time to wallow
in your absence, so i was splattered with

the lack of you again, bathed in loss so sweet
i almost mistook it for your hands

running down my chest. i can’t help
the cringe my face coils into when i hear

silverware scraping against porcelain.
or the way i dig my nails into my tingling

calf to coax it out of numbness. i flinch
when the walls crack their knuckles.

i don’t have a reflex for you. i’m stuck

in this hellhole where phantom hands
send chills down my body in the way i always

wanted you to touch me. when the white of
the snow sheets slapping against my window

catch my eye, i prepare to converse with
the ghost of you. the hairs on the small

of my back rise in the outline of your
handprint— my body still a snow angel

you keep coming back to make.

 

 

 

Nila Narain (they/he) is a queer Tamilian poet and creator studying computer science and creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They have previously been published in Serotonin Poetry, giallo lit, and perhappened. In their spare time they like to sing, dance, and stress-craft.

On Wednesdays, the city turns up its collar
Not rough, never vindictive
Subtle as a new chill against your cheek
Or a mist that dims the eyes
Stray thoughts stow like orphans into fastening sleeves
Shadows slimming on the concrete, bereaved by twilight

Today, dusk was an ebbing tide; we drained from school like water through a sieve
I buried my coat in my bag, arms bare and ponderous
Even bowing my head, I sensed your approach, you with your fraying maroon cuffs,
face a study in angles, your gaze like charcoal
softening everything it lights upon,
your hand nudging my hair

I thought, I want a conversation in polychrome
I thought, I want a riot
To lean my head on your shoulder, thread our hands into latticework
Startle you into laughter until your hood falls away

But the cold was biting and my arms were bare
I could only smile, trembling with unshed words
In the interregnum between sense and sensation
I thought, maybe that’s why they say to wear your heart on your sleeve.
If it breaks, the shards slit the fabric and not your skin.

What I mean is: we all crave love, we are all soured by it
Hands cup loose change, hands build barricades
The wind is a lone rogue across the flat sea
Mourning the missing things she will never seek
We are too fragile for this, this restless imitation,
this plundering of ruins for a scrap of our salvation

 

 

Allyson Ye is a high school senior from Hong Kong. She writes prose to vicariously experience the lives of others, and poetry to romanticize her own. Beyond writing, she is a passionate genre fiction advocate, budding fortune teller, and a capella enthusiast. You can find her on Instagram @sunnygally. She hopes you have a very nice day.

 

 

I am sitting here once again with nothing
but a blank page labelled POEMS
and I wonder why
All my poems are about writing poems.

The walls are blank. The cats have
stopped fighting. The child that cries
next door has gone to sleep. It is too dark
to see the birds outside. Beauty is scarce at this time.
And
The room implodes with the unbearable weight of poems.

The radiator screams and I am saved.

If it weren’t for the radiator and my mother’s handball games I would be the most boring poet on the planet.

I would sit at the bottom of The Ocean of Heavy Poems and write poem after poem about what it’s like to write poems. I would kill the fat poem fish with my poetry.

Today she won two games and I won one. Youth and lanky limbs are on my side but she is a much smarter player than me. One day I will be able to slow down and think, or she will be unable to speed up, of course; the cycle will complete.

Today her glasses fell off and she missed the ball and the gray hair of a monarch burst loose for all to see. I laughed and she laughed, we laughed and I imagined my parents’ funeral. I always imagine their funeral as one, a double feature, as if their life force is inextricably linked. At the funeral I will make lots of jokes and they will laugh and smash
their coffin to bits and leap and dance and cry out because their
son is just so dang funny.

A funeral is a good thing to write a poem about.
The other day I attended my first Zoom funeral.
My dead grandfather’s close friends fumbled with the camera and told stories about people they
killed in a war. It was very poetic.

The poetry of my grandfather’s Zoom funeral joins the poetry of the blank walls, my screaming
radiator, the cats that have stopped fighting, the child that cries next door and the birds that I
can’t see
and the beauty is less scarce but it is still me vs. poetry and dignity vs. Zoom and
funerals vs. handball.

 

Liam Powers is a high school senior living in Brooklyn, NY. He is in the Writer’s institute program at Edward R Murrow High School. His muse right now is his eclectic neighborhood of Sunset Park. His default mode is practicing jazz guitar, piano or drums. He also loves wilderness canoeing, handball and every dog he’s ever met.

 

 

~this poem originally appeared in The Magnet, — a literary magazine at Edward R. Murrow High School~

I’m the ship’s navigator when the stars disappear
Constellations leave no consolation
Orion hunts further along the horizon
Cassiopia spies other skies to rule
Aries rams into the waves
And I’m a drop in the ocean
No notion of where to point my sails

I’m the orchestra’s conductor when time stops
Metronomes clock out and go home
Clocks stop in a timeless tick
Chronos is dropping, dropped, drops chronology
Then picks it up without checking the page numbers
Musicians wait for the beaten beat of my baton
Never, and always, all at once

I’m the tightrope walker when the world quakes
The Earth’s core is a clown, spinning plates
Arms tired, gravity drops reality
Mountains move, shaking snow from their slopes
Titans turn my tightrope into a skipping rope
Turning me into a skydiver without a parachute
Shooting into the valley
I’m the escape artist when the cage turns invisible
Audiences wonder why I’m struggling to leave
Assistants hold keys just out of my reach
Give me a stall and applaud their accessibility
I take Orion’s sword and slice through the locks
Take time from Chronos, take the Titans’ strength
And escape.

 

 

Izzy Searle is a neurodivergent poet from Sussex. Her writing is featured on the International Network of Italian Theatre, and she has a poetry anthology in the process of publication. In her spare time, Izzy loves to hike and volunteer at Scouts.

 Our mother in the blackberry bushes. Who knew
where she came from, with her peach-colored sweater and

blue bucket hat. Someone said she had yellow hair
when she was young. As if that were important. This day,

under a summer sky, she names wildflowers with her hands and
fishes through brambles for berries. She hums

what served as a lullaby, when her children were children. Someone
said she was a good mother. Who remembers?

She always foraged, always picked up ideas on the side of the road
(like blackberries) and brought them home. Cartons of recycled cardboard,

green and sugar-stained. We were like fingers inked in blue-black juice, teeth
grinning and gritted with seeds, stomachs rumbling with joy.

Someone said we should be patient, and make pie, as if as
there was something important about eating food

with forks. When did we know we were children exiled, our
mother singing us back from the thickets

with a lullaby. In the end what is hunger but lack
and we lacked for nothing. Someone said we had plenty

of nothing. Who remembers. We had our mother, who had blackberry
bushes. And there was something important about that.

 

 

Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin University, where she studies writing and business. She won the 2018 National Writers Series Poetry Scholarship and the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Calvin University. Her work is featured or forthcoming in PANK Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Dialogue, and the National Writers Series Journal. She hopes to continue sharing poetry after graduation.