Winter Poems/Jan 2021

I.
Cold hard gray eyes,
burn holes into my throbbing
chest. An icy, tingling feeling shivers
down my spine, and I realize
I can’t beg, plead. Darkness
coats, and something sharp slices
into me, digging deeper,
deeper. If only for half
a heartbeat, I pray
it’s a cure, a needle injecting
medicine into my veins
and wrapping a layer around
my gushing blood. But the thought fades
as I realize fangs claw
into my skin, sinking
and sinking further into flesh
and marrow. I want to shout,
scream and cry, but jaws engulf
my neck like a shark. Frozen,
I feel the teeth strip away
limbs. Soon, it will burn everything
like a flame, a blazing fire
that turns cities into ash. But now,
it creeps close, until its reeking breath
clouds over my ears and whispers:
I’m here to stay.

II.
If someone asked me eighty years from now what it was like to live during COVID-19, I’m not sure I would know what to say. I think I would write a poem instead.

 

Daniel Boyko is an aspiring writer, poet, movie reviewer, and animal lover from New Jersey. A high school junior, he’s been previously published in Teen Ink, Blue Marble Review, The Daphne Review, Navigating the Maze, and The Telling Room, among others. He’s currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony Lit and the Vice President of Polyphony Lit’s Junior Board. Wherever his dog is, he can’t be far behind.

have discarded my name. Cast it into the clattering cattails across the road from my house. It was sucking the marrow from my bones, reader. Devolving me into animation. A desecrated host. I stretched yesterday and felt as though my skin had shifted into that of a worm’s. Segmented. Preferring to partake in burial rites. I should have collapsed, reader. The mirror shattered instead, unable to bear the image of my bird-boned limbs. I dashed out into the rain. Knelt in the flooded grass. Painted my jawline and cheekbones stark with muddy hatred. Reader, even dirtied I am achingly bare. Painfully other. A shadow yearning to cast itself into brightness, only to panic when it has been swallowed whole by noon-time sunlight. Left meandering in the clearly articulated limbo of twilight. I need to fill that emptiness with deft strokes. But reader? I am left staring at an unsteady hand.

 

Zoe Reay-Ellers is a writer from Washington State. You can find her work in The Heritage Review, and The Eunoia Review. When not writing, she can be found baking and taking long walks.

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.

every evening, the clock sings lucid songs of grass.
of unknown fields in distant green. heart pumping
in circadian. then the pasture swallows in whole;
grass becomes bed of thorns and lullaby becomes gutted
fragment of sheet music; deafening silence ascending
in clockwork notation. paramnesia in three-four time

my dad gave me the wisdom of counting sheep
to count valley sheep & barn house sheep & to count
in beat with celestial bodies. to be enamoured
with sheep & sheep & sheep

but the difference between dad and I
is that he grew up somewhere around orchards
where the sheep were abundant enough
to properly dampen night terrors

but I grew up with digital sheep
and wear digital wool; polyester-based;
no flocks for me to count at night.

this is a eulogy for the pastures.
a war cry for the digital age.

to sleep now is to sleep between screams
of cellphone ringtones, huddled in a comforter
spun out of plastic

 

Rena Su is a writer from Vancouver, Canada, and the author of the chapbook Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction (ZED Press, Jun 2021). Her work whose work has been recognized by Simon Fraser University, the City of Surrey, and the Pulitzer Center. You can find her on Twitter @RenaSuWrites

 

 

 

Rena Su is a writer from Vancouver, Canada, and the author of the chapbook Preparing Dinosaurs for Mass Extinction (ZED Press, Jun 2021). Her work has been recognized by Simon Fraser University, the City of Surrey, and the Pulitzer Center. You can find her on Twitter @RenaSuWrites

Leave me to dream that curve of skin,
curve of lip. For a woman is a woman

only in dangerous land—parts hardened
by gaze, coaxed open by teeth. I realize

all along I’ve been waiting for a mistake.
This mistake—asking after origin. It never

came—it just was. Like a mountain was, like
a woman was. Umber & sloping.

 

Y.A. Suh is a student from New Jersey whose work appears in Half Mystic and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and has been recognized by YoungArts, UK Poetry Society, and The New York Times, among others. She aims to foster love for speculative fiction in the emerging writers’ community through her publication, Wintermute Lit.