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.

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.

for my cousins on the other side of the 38-seon*

 i wonder / could we have been // (real) family / had they not
chiseled our / fate & had jo-//-seon not been / scissored apart. scarred.
i beg this / epistolary // not become an / elegy

 

*38-seon: the 38th parallel north, the line that divides North and South Korea

 

 

Skylar is a high schooler from South Korea who enjoys writing poems that help her make sense of real events and experiences. Her work appears in The Daphne Review.

I don’t walk how I used to and I piss on almost everything:
doorframe corners, the humming refrigerator, table legs,
human legs, couch cushions, flowerpots, unshelved shoes—
anywhere but the backyard. It’s sacred out here.
I can ignore the puppyish tremor of my limbs
and see out my good eye the world’s slow-turning marvels.
The haunt of grass. The baby bees, clutching their pollen.
Oh, the troves of dirt I once unearthed, the holy hills.

I have tried to tell my owner, silly girl and awful listener,
of all the names and places of things. That I have deciphered
the secrets of our shared niche, and the codes cannot be viewed
from beneath the blankets of the comforter I am shoved off,
nor are they hidden alongside a ham treat, enclosed in her fist.
I’ve yowled at her, in my most potent and insistent snaps:
Have you seen the dreary socks in the laundry basket?
The lines between the kitchen tiles? The color of my fur?
The dogged flickering of lightbulbs, dreaming in the ceilings?

 

Isa Mari De Leon is a Filipinx American writer. She is currently studying English at the University of California, Berkeley. A previous English tutor, publishing intern at W. W. Norton & Company, and game writing intern at Riot Games, Isa is a student of any form of writing she can get her hands on. When not reading or writing, she might be playing with her dog, studying in a library, or playing video games very, very poorly.