Winter Poems/Jan 2021

To speak
is to sing.

Just try to say
a sentence and not

make music.
Every word

a rhythm,
every syllable

a song.
O, phonemes

simple sounds
separating

drink from
dragon,

feast from
famine,

Zeus, zipline,
zinfandel.

Strawberries and cream,
American Dream.

Right, wrong,
Atomic bomb.

Holy, harmonic,
Human.

 

Nick Trelstad is a senior in the College of St. Scholastica’s English education program. He still stans Phillis Wheatley to this day.

i should be ashamed but i’m flattered. beauty

exists in solitude and sadness. i did nothing but
hide you in brushstrokes and poetry. the
redundancy of your memory deemed normal. your
soul, the yearning to understand you as boundless
as the ocean. from this terrible addicting hope for
something with you. it’s revolting, how much i say

i’ll love you through words, how much i want to give
you the skeleton of the universe and the secrets
of every burning star and how much i want to
hold you under the gentle yellow light of a
dying afternoon. what little time we spent

barely, barely held any meaning but through the
murky lens of the world, you saw me crystal
clear. i can’t count how many times i felt
ready to run to the ends of the earth for you. sometimes,
all the time, all that i am
is the sublimation of my desires for

you. i turned you into poetic value, capitalized
what should’ve been empathy into a dozen flowery
words. loving you has become a solitary act, a
solitary sin for the ages.

 

Zoe is an aspiring neuroscience major with a love for ink and calligraphy and a deep hatred for milk. She spends her time dabbling in poetry and the arts and watching the same sitcoms over and over.

today i walked outside and saw
orange walled sky
like the desert had thrown its skirts
on the ceiling and the walls

i breathe deep
(for it is like this every morning)
i think the orange is searing my lungs
coloring it the same as the expanse above me
heavy as a body
it sinks
(or perhaps it is I who sinks)

i think if i think hard enough
stare long enough
i can make beauty out of this —
this orange plumed Sky with its blood-inked sun
its matching twin peeking out at night
like a blue moon but better because
orange is unmentioned and should therefore be rarer

until there is a scratch within my throat
i cough.
saliva. sticky. phlegm.
i rush inside.

 

Ailun Shi recently withdrew from UC Berkeley in order to take a gap year to go on the adventure of her life. Her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and published in Helen: a literary magazine, Germ Magazine, the Apprentice Writer, and more. She’s an avid novelist and calligrapher. Her gap adventures can be found on ailunshi.wordpress.com.

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.