Author: fpoussin

Enoch Jacobus

Shelby Dobson

Dear Papa,

I used to be the happiest girl around when you were here. I was always optimistic, and I made the mood change for the better. After you left me, I changed. I vowed to never be that naive little girl. The one who thought you would never leave me. The girl you knew is dead and buried. I changed my hair, my style of clothing, and how I perceived the world. Everything about me had to change once you left. I needed to be a girl you’d never known so that the experience I feel now won’t feel stolen. Like I’m living the same life, just without you. It has to be different. It must be different. If I’m going to stay on this planet without you, it has to feel like an alternate universe, because now I can’t go anywhere without seeing you. You will forever haunt the death you committed. You were supposed to stay. You were meant to stay. But you left without a goodbye, taking your life in your own hands. Leaving me behind.

My only chance at a goodbye,

Your granddaughter

Sierra Withers

Thousands of lights flicker in the dark
The innocent run for them with glee
Some chase the bugs as they glide higher
Others get distracted by the howling
in the leaves and hoots in the trees
Sometimes one catches one of these lights
Foran instant it sits in the palm of their hand
It blinks with warmth and crawls around
Some hold on too tight

Alicyn Harris

Jesse Lee

The plaque read “Viking Age Female, Ninth Century A.D.”. She lay in state, surrounded by her trinkets and a miasma of climate-controlled air. The tinny voice of the audio tour told me that she was estimated to have died of an illness around the age of twenty-five to thirty. She was of Scandinavian origins, buried in in English soil, possibly a settler in the Danelaw. I paused the recorded monologue.
Her clothes were varying shades of rotted brown, fading into the dry parchment color of her bones. Small locks of tinder grass hair clung to her shrunken scalp; her hands gently folded over exposed ribs. A glance at the display above her resting place revealed an artist’s loving rendition of what this woman might have looked like in life. The recreation had a stern face surrounded by elaborate blond braids. She wore a grey shift under a woad blue apron dress with amber beads strung about her throat. I wondered if it was accurate.
I twirled my own braids between my fingers. Did she fight to make her plaits neat, as I had fought this morning, even with the aid of modern hair tools? Did she choose the amber beads to draw the eye of a young man in her village? What kinds of jokes made that stern expression crack into a laugh? Her last meal, examined during an archaeological autopsy, contained berries. I licked my lips, tasting the remnants of the blueberry jam from my bagel. I wondered if blue was her favorite color. It’s mine.
Centuries of time and inches of glass separate us, but we tell the same stories, fractures in our bones, tears, smiles, and whispered wishes. I look at the hammer pendant resting in the hollow of her throat and reach up to touch the runestone necklace resting in my own. We have shaped the same names with our lips. Thor, Tyr, Freya, Odin. Fireside tales and historical research, reaching hands across the gap of centuries and cultures. We heard stories of the same heroes. We have watched the same stars.

Alicyn Harris

It is not her fault,
The way her feelings suffocate me
I drown in them,
But I know she is drowning too.
Walking on eggshells around her
So she doesn’t crack and spill
A single misstep and she would cry out
I was not perfect enough
Too messy
Too loud
Too thin
Too expensive
Her attempts to love me left me
Strangled, exhausted
And my heart hurts for her,
She doesn’t know any other way to love
I understand my mother,
But I cannot forgive her
Still, I keep going back
Because all I ever wanted was my mother’s love

Natalie Tankersley

Writers are born,
shaking, squealing, and struggling to describe the world
they’ve been thrust into, sitting
on their grandfather’s knee, babbling, bumbling, and bouncing as stories pile up
in their heads, collecting
dust before they learn to
turn thoughts into ink

Writers are created,
whispering, waiting, and wondering about the things that
live in their heads, emerging
from the depths of nights alone, escaping, envying, and editing
their thoughts until
their hearts bleed, spilling
aching and raw onto
a blank page

Writers are forged,
hunching, hallucinating, and haunting over their desk with
hands on keyboards, begging
the words to come,
dragging, demanding, and daring writer’s block to stand
in their way, knocking
the walls to their creative
wellspring down

Caroline Lewis

I have long ago learned to fear
that when everything is sunny,
and I feel an unnatural calm,
a storm is brewing somewhere in the center,
so far away and so enormous
that I will not see it until it is upon me.
I have learned to walk in the rain for hours,
until the downpour forces me to flee
into the nearest house.

I have long ago learned
that the only safe house is mine.
That the only place that I truly know in those times is my mind.
That even when it is dark, I know the way around,
and I can feel the furniture,
and when the wind blows in,
at least the cracks in the walls are familiar.

But you—you contradict what I have learned,
when I thought I could not have
the beauty of the sea without the storm,
the fire of the sunset without the dark soon following.
You are like a warm day with sun and sky and breeze,
and true peace, for I know you will not
bring a storm, I know that we will not
create a tempest.
I know you are the fine line that I have been searching for,
wondering about, for years,
hope versus history.
I fear no storm brewing on the horizon,
and when I think of the unexpected squalls that will arise one day,
I know that we together
can walk, nay, dance through the rain.

And I know because you, everything with you, feels like a house I know well—
a home.
A house I have never set foot in,
yet when the lights are out,
I know my way in the dark,
and when the wind blows in, the cracks don’t matter—
you are here.

Ashley Lasseter

Today, I sat at a table with the most sublime view.
The sky was ablaze with the most wonderful hue- And the tea that we shared tasted of berries- And we laughed as we passed each other cherries.
We roared as we conversed of dreams,
All with buoyant beams and the most alluring themes.
How redolent the scent of leather cologne;
How soft the exchanges of our touch- Oh, how the time indeed slipped by us unknown- But tonight, I sat at a table with the most sublime view,
A view full of life and of love,
And yet the grandest view
Was you.

Alicyn Harris