Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry, Prosetry

Natural Disaster – Maria Gray

i. my best friend tells me
she is a misprint in her own life story
because no one has ever told her
she can narrate it herself
ii. at age twelve, the lightning
stretching across my hips demands
more attention than any other natural disaster
and even holding my skeleton together
seems like more trouble than it’s worth
iii. i am helping elementary schoolers
during their quarter-hour break
from a theater class, making sure
they fill up their water bottles
and nibble on their graham crackers
when one dark-eyed little girl
confesses she thinks she is too big
to let anything past her crooked teeth
iv. every magazine i’ve ever read
tells skinny girls to wear large shirts
to create the illusion of a bust
and tells larger girls to don
vertical stripes and straight cuts
to form a shrinking silhouette because
no matter a woman’s size
the most beautiful part of her
is always the negative space
v. i may usually be terrified of heights
but i don’t get vertigo when i look down
and see where i used to be because
it’s no secret: i am better off where i am
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Poetry

Thoughts – Harika Kottakota

A solemn beauty
Profound and universal, rooted and blooming
That entails enigmatic tomorrows
Rimmed with ochre
A dear requiem
Of scarce constancy
Teetering between virtue and sin
Like spinning dimes
A dogmatic mutiny
Alloys rage with leadership for blades
Winds, now messengers of cinder
Dwindles into reason
A robust spirit
Inoculates joy, tranquilizes despair
As it pledged upon
The frontiers of space and time
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Poetry

Who am I – -Daphnie Ivelisse Rodriguez

Who am I?

Who am I
but a delicate porcelain vase
that someone lets slip from their
hands
to break into fragments that hide
in the darkness?
Who am I
a new-born fawn that has no strength
to pick itself up?
Who am I
but simply a bird who can no longer soar into
the skies to the destinations it has
dreamed of?
Who am I
but simply a forgotten love
replaced?
Who am I
similar to a secret known to cause shame
and cowardliness?
Who am I?
Who am I…

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Poetry

Shining Reverie – Brooke Safferman

Shimmering reverie,
Where the statuesque mountains tower over uncharted streams as alert as you did
Those vivacious, pulsating nights as the stars did shine
Though not as bright as your wildfire eyes
And though not as bright as your electrical mind
Nothing can compare to the impulses of within
The internal itches that make one roused with a perverse delight,
Nor the external urges that make one tremble with anticipation of the indefinite, the unguaranteed
One time you instructed me to follow your lead
I agreed, dutifully, loyally, stepping along
My bare feet made ever-lasting prints upon the marshy rapture
My steps were to the pace of my own rhythm
But the sweet, sweet melody in the background,
Well, that was all yours.

You showed me, with a grand, sweeping gesticulation of your right arm
All that the world is composed of,
From the arcane way that blades of grass can be split down their centers
And create two out of what previously was only one
To the way moss grows upon pavement built of brick,
Creeping into crevices and finding itself a new home in the spaces I had never known to previously exist.

I suppose, in theory, you hadn’t provided me with too much
But yet, you thrust upon me a landscape, un-gated
A world of boundless expansion of the mind,
Reaching further and further into my nebular abyss

All you ever did was introduce me to life
But without such an overture as enchanting as yours,
I would have never known how simply sweet the melody is:
(The melody that we stepped to on that dazzling, radiant evening)

The Anthem of the Living.

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Poetry

@landlocks — Maria Gray

@landlocks– Instagram

she rents out a room in an upper chamber of my heart,
paying by the month until she grows bored of such
a dusty, overpriced place to stay and
what a hurricane that girl is, leaving a bitter
taste in my mouth until i can’t feel the words I speak

but maybe I’m better off not drawn to her
barbed escapades, not returning to my parents
in a matchbox accompanied by
staged sound effects of slamming doors
that made my bones shake
and no friend to apply makeup to my corpse:
i got the best that i could have gotten,
a mere aftertaste that taints the taste
of unplanned joy

she loses herself in her own living room sometimes
i mean now that she’s found a home that suits her
she called me for the first time
in six months and i couldn’t hang up
not when she’s cried and naked the speakers shake:
“I have no love to I’ve and it’s left me to lose”
choking in her apologies and
leaving them to invade her respiratory system,
becoming a part of her she can’t fully breathe out
until the day she sighs for the last time

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