Category: Poetry

Beach, Jacob Roosa     I fear the swell and push of crowds; the incoherent chatter closing in from all sides. I fear looking up from my book and finding someone there or worse, someone won’t be there. I fear this fear will prevent our meeting.   I fear the day we meet. That it will…

Blue, Linnea Shurig       The car stops in front of the worn fence, headlights reaching for the little blue building that waits ahead. A sign flickers in the faint light of the window, the neon blue and red of ‘OPEN’ dancing on a wooden ice cream cone planted outside. I recognize the writing in…

2, Julia Broeker   His parents hold him over             his brother’s grave, explain how he is his brother born again. It is the miracle             of rebirth, renaming, reclamation. The day of his birth the mother is taken in distress, gazing at her newborn             child. The mother has named the son in the guise…

Still Air, Shareefah Pereira     From the high plains of heaven rises the mighty Heaven Shining. The stretch of her cheeks comes ten red suns, and yet the three-legged crow – a mutation, an erection, and yet Robin Hood before bed – a white warrior, and yet bibles on bedsides mute the generations. I stuff…

Baptism,  Mia Silvan-Grau     god is just another old man laying claim to my body, with that divine right. he poses on my pale altar, anointing me with the knowledge that no matter where I touch myself he was there first.   About the Author Alyssa Russell · Wheaton College Alyssa Russell is a…

Untitled (athlete), Katie Burleson [Trigger Warning: Brief mention of r*pe] The best way to remember is to be born again completely, slick with red and heat, til the cord is cut and the body stilled into awe. At trial, the mind re-buries itself, memories stacked like silver fish. One last drink for every hurt to carry.…

Waiting, Shiya Wu     You are sleeping on 400-count sheets colored fitfully red, your mattress flipped soft, your shades unworried, your lilies unanswered. The window is silent, as you are silent: it is September and you are in love with a dream of arrival. This year — you can smell it! — you know it…

Beach, Jacob Roosa   Two bicycles, one twisted and its back wheel spinning crazily; one boy limps, the right half of his body supported by the other’s hip; we grow up separately and unavoidably flawed, in the way a tomato plant will bend in the rain until the main stalk snaps and small black ants emerge…

Lagomorph Greetings, Natasha Change     Everyonehere has a scarecrow smile, dried up and useless as the land. Makes my skin prickle, how these dead stalks like to hiss at closed windows. Bent and forked like devils’ tails, they scratch this hot itch behind my eyelids. Brand me with blistered hands. I know southwest summers, that…

BODIES!, Serena Hocharoen     He told me my Body wasn’t his preference. Said it was: too big too loud too feminist and I could feel the slice of his tongue open up trenches in my flesh and skim over fault lines where past meets fat. I tried to change for him. Meet his preference.…

Suffocating Nature, Camelia Rojas     My grandmother planted herself here among the arrowheads. She dug her husband out of the marsh— hands cupped as she washed him. They turned metal siding into brick. Within the lilies, she told me to let the earth stain my knees black like the grease of my grandfather’s plumbing hands.…

A New World of Light, Jacob Fisher     We went to an amusement park in downtown Calcutta, with fire-breathing macho men and an artist who wrote my name on a single grain of uncooked rice. There was a water slide with mats made of golfing turf, and no soft landing to break the fall. My…

A Meal of Crayons, Bryan Rubin   My first art teacher was my uncle who was a boy. He, at fourteen, took my seven-year-old drawings of long-haired mermaids and flowers and handed me the backside of one of his exam papers, with red ink splattered on the surface. He then centered a chair in the room…

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Morgan Granosk     Far above our paper houses, God spilled milk into the sky. Smeared clouds to make curd sunsets. Beautified that chalky orange against the white street lamps, as if to mimic a paradise, as if to say, “Never leave.” The candy dust from our pixie…

Persephone, Esther Tang     When I think about 1945, I think about peaches. Sweet and fuzzy with a fat, brown pit smack in the center. I remember biting into a fresh May peach from the backyard when my mother ran into the kitchen yelling the war was over.   I was twelve. Mother hugged Aunt…