Category: Uncategorized

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

Cathy Ulrich

i.

We all go to the Grand Canyon at once. Everybody does. We go in cars, in buses, on the backs of our boyfriend’s sputtering motorcycles.

Someone has champagne, someone else has wine.

Kampai! we toast, and wait for the end.

ii.

A small man presses a large button.

iii.

A small man insults another small man. The second small man insults the first. Cities get involved, then countries. Everyone chooses sides. Someone presses a button.

iv.

Meteors fall from the sky. We all step out on our porches to watch.

Grandpa puffs on one of his darn (Grandma used to call them, before she died) cigars.

We had a good run while it lasted, he says, eyes skyward.

v.

Meteors fall from the sky. Someone has invented a laser grid to shoot them down. It isn’t as effective as we had hoped.

vi.

A small man shoots some people with a big gun. More and more small men do this until all that is left is two small men and two big guns.

vii.

Someone opens a portal to a wormhole. We stretch and churn into the vacuum of space.

viii.

Aliens. They’re angry about something.

ix.

Aliens. They have come to save us, they say, except they actually mean the sea turtles, whose old man faces they adore. The vaporize the rest of us with their fancy alien weapons.

x.

The ice caps melt. We all drown. Our corpses poison the water. The last thing left is one sad-eyed sea turtle.

xi.

The wrath of god takes us as we deserve. Our religious aunties clutch their bibles to their chests.

At last, they say, and their faces are aglow with death and faith.

xii.

There is one bird feather in the grass. The wind ripples through it in the quiet now.

Elsewhere, there are only bones.

Fabrice Poussin

Enoch Jacobus

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.

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.

Andrea Locke

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

Ava O’Malley

Up early enough to remember autumn,
a mere threat just six weeks away,
we pounded down onto the gravel,
too cold beneath stiff towels to slow into a stroll.

We dove off the metal docks without thought,
our feet slipping off the swaying metal.
and disappeared into the lake like a chorus of raindrops
swallowed by waves, digested into our own spray.

It was too soon to be cognizant of our bodies,
pre-teen in faded one-pieces.
It did not matter what we looked like the dawn
of our corporeal conscientiousness.
Instead, we only knew what it felt like to be
freezing, kicking, restless;
Minnows shortly before the thaw.

Our hair quickly crisped when we emerged to gasp,
hands splashed the slate gray surface as a school
of sunburnt scalps greeted the flesh-pink sky.
We feared only the absence of one another
and perhaps the graze of a water snake that did not exist.

The sun broke like an egg as we squinted through damp lashes,
Desperately treading and drugged with adrenaline.
All loose braids and peeling skin and soggy friendship bracelets,
A voice called upon us,
“Who wants to jump again?”