Winter Poems/Jan 2021

as the moon raises higher
we crawl under barbed wire
and into the fields
that no longer give us their yield

‘us’ meaning our ancestors
who fought off pests, men, and worse
just for the farm to fall
to bankruptcy like a crooked wall
to more crooked powers
“the farm is still ours”
you say to me
as we head towards the tree,
path like muscle memory,
as it’s too dark to see

the tree holds our family’s past
our initials will be the last
for the future is far away
this is a landmark of yesterday.

you turn on the flashlight
no more fleeing, I want to fight
but the bright pink ‘x’ says otherwise
now our entire family dies
with this tree.
our history.
“what will we do with the rest of our lives?”
you hold out the carving knife.

 

Claire McNerney is a student, writer, and performer from California. She loves space fantasy, audio dramas, and bullet journaling. In her free time, she produces the anthology podcast Cumulonimbus.

Through my window,
A leaf falls.
A minuet with the Autumn wind,
Drifting, like a feather-
Down.

I wonder-
Did the leaf see it coming
Surely-
Green, yellow, crimson, brown
How long has it been waiting?

Did it cling onto the stem,
Like a child to its mother, afraid-
Did it plead with the sky
For one more sunrise
Or did it let go, accepting?

Ripping away from the stem,
Did pain erupt blinding?
Did light reflect differently
Did the world halt
For a moment?

Was it like meditation
Riding the waves of air,
Letting out a breath?
Was every color infused with alcohol-
Was gravity a friend

And after it lands
On the sidewalk,
Lifeless, drying, brittle
When whisked off by the wind-
Where does it go?

How, does it end?

One day,
we will know

 

Emma Zhang is an eighth grade aspiring writer who lives in California. Aside from writing, she loves reading, art, creating new drinks, and obsessing over MBTI. This is her first publication.

swirling in a teapot
tinted broth and lemon wedge bones
corrode into corpses

it was the making of marble memories
sharpening knives under the soft glow of stove light
summer sadness cure

charcoal-skinned moon-eyed faces
have been here once
and will be when the sun diminishes into a candle wick
the dying glow wishfully full
so wicked; alive

swirling in the eye of a hurricane
mold collects between dying peels of citrus

they were the last to witness the power of the night
and now no one is left
to recollect
summer

 

Zara Rahman is a spoken word artist dedicated to the craft of creative writing and storytelling. Through written and spoken word poetry, Zara has shared stories with audiences up to 2000 and in more intimate settings. The Toronto based artist holds numerous awards and publications in local competitions and virtual settings. She is also the founder of a nonprofit organization called Youth Professionals, dedicated to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth and their future careers. Zara’s goal is to not only teach the craft of creative writing, but to pass down the courage required to express oneself in new and exciting forms.

i spend my afternoons in the heat-soaked house
sitting backwards, watching bark-wrapped hands
push and pull at eggshell dough
kneading a slow heartbeat beneath
an incessant cricket symphony.
i witness the birth of mantou; one, then two
plumps of dusty sugar lining a bamboo basket
warm like the soul she wants to shape me into.

it is hard to describe the space i stopped taking up
when i began drifting into the next world, but
she feels me quietly; watching, learning.

if i inhale too deeply, i may cease to exist:
the afternoon rhythm roots
my empty body
to the stifling, dirt-packed ground.
bike wheels crack gravel outside
and whispering grass hushes laughter.
the sun bakes my cousins’ skin gold
but i keep inside
to spend my afternoons in the quiet
letting her press my bones soft.

 

Alicia Hsu is a Taiwanese-American junior at G.W. Hewlett High School on Long Island, New York. Her poetry is published and/or forthcoming in Euonia Review, Skipping Stones Magazine, Vintage (her school’s creative writing journal), and more. When she isn’t dreaming up new stories or escaping in a fantasy novel, you can find her watching nostalgic movies and taking walks with her two dogs.

we plant seeds like the deeds we forget
to tend like the weeds we need to understand
beauty. weeds are beautiful in the same way
destruction is beautiful. like bleeding
from the prick of a needle. like warnings
we forget to heed. like excavators
of greed. that’s us. we should listen
to our own creed. but we never believe
our promises to achieve. when i was thirteen
we planted trees. i was in desperate need
of a friend. not someone who wanted me to like
pop songs and shopping sprees and to always agree.
having travelled the seas and run out of pleas
i didn’t know then what i would one day see.
now i’ve sown my seeds and i am
rooted among a forest of others like me.

 

After years of relocation, Svetlana Sterlin was raised by her Russian parents in Brisbane, Australia, where she completed a BFA and contributes to Our Culture Magazine and ScreenRant. Her work appears in several publications, including Entropy Magazine, Santa Fe Writers Project, and AndAlso Books’ anthology, ‘Within/Without These Walls’, published in association with the 2018 Brisbane Open House.     [ https://linktr.ee/svetlanasterlin ]

i thought of you like punctuation. as a period, you stopped
me in my tracks with every word that left your mouth. you
acted as a comma, connecting two parts of a whole together
like the way our lips seal to one another as if we are trying to
become one. the linking of our hands is a semi-colon, because
then we are two clauses. able to stand on our own two feet but
refusing to because we have each other. your fingers interlacing
with mine as we lean on each other like a forward and a back slash,
because even on paper, we are a pair. in bed, we fit each other like
quotation marks, marking the beginning and the end of unspoken
sentences that hang in the air between us. when you were angry,
your whole body would be straight as an exclamation mark. pulling
yourself tall and taut to tell me you were emotional and wanted some
space, so i would tab myself away and give you the room of an indent
for your paragraph. your mouth would be a hyphen, nothing like
the purse of an asterisk when you leaned in to kiss me. but eventually,
we’d shift and come back together again as two curved brackets, like moon
crescents joining to make a whole. to me, you are every grammatical rule there is:
everything that makes me coherent.

 

Jessica Tsang is a seventeen-year-old based in Hong Kong. At the age of five, she found that drawing stories was better than simply drawing, then found that writing stories was better than drawing them. When she is not writing or contemplating the meaning of life, you can find her studying, playing music, or drowning herself in copious amounts of green tea.