Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry

How to Look for Shapes in the Sky – Iman Messado

1. Make sure your eyes are clear.
You can’t have any cobwebs on the sill,
your eyelashes must be brushed straight through.
Are your tear ducts clogged?
Go ahead and polish your irises
until they shine as brilliantly
as the sun does
when you forgot your sunglasses
on a particularly
hot spring-summer day.
2. Have you looked yet?
Don’t do it until you’re ready.
Now that your eyes can match the sun for
clarity and
luster,
you have to understand
the implications
of that.
You have to remember to
blink.
Just because you can
stare down the sun,
doesn’t mean you should.
You’ll work it out along the way –
just know that your head is made
of stone and that
the sky is a celestial ocean.
Fear drowning.
3. I don’t mean to scare you.
I also don’t mean to control you.
I’m only worried – you have so much potential –
I sound ridiculous but
you only have to look into the mirror to see what I mean.
Have you looked?
Do you like it?
What do mountains have on the shifting marshmallow peaks of a Cumulus?
What does grandmother’s feather bed have on
the interminable expanses of heavenly soft Stratus?
4. The shapes are supposed to be what
really matter.
You’re supposed to ignore all that
has and is and will be
in favor of
practicality and analysis and intellectuality.
Of course,
it makes sense,
it should be as it is.
It’s just unfortunate is all.
It’s just you have so much potential.
So make sure your eyes are clear.
Remember that your head is a stone.
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Poetry

“I think this is maybe gonna stick with me for a long time.” – Matt Gryzduk

You will forget the way the friction burn felt at four years old, forearm dragging along rug

You will remember it all at once when people change their Twitter bios to the same thing at once

You will forget her resting expression because you never knew her well enough

You will forget that you thought about death maybe too much in the past but now never

You will forget birthday cakes, you will forget stories told to you under fluorescent lights

You will forget rewriting your name into her mouth

You will forget that it comes and goes in waves

You will forget that you’re only the second to worst person in general

You will forget that you weren’t thinking but are now very conscious

You will forget her name

But you will remember the friction burn, graft it onto others and like you perhaps they will tell others about the scar it left.

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Poetry

Seasons – Harika Kottakota

You stand in the wheat plains gazing heavenward
Palm rested on the side of a chestnut foal
Cumulus drifted slowly, soft heels dug into clods
Shoots brushed cranberry cheeks, crickets whispered
Their secret melody under the settling dusk
Gold waves to rickety barn, sides infested with ivy
Dismantled windmill blades sprinkled in dew drops,
Seedlings of those scary thunder nights,
Lay glistening like a second sun on muddy sky
Faded fence skewed like an ice skater’s blade
Scraping joyously on frozen lakes under Moon lamps
Waking to Mother’s oven and Grace’s doll house
Father rapt in daily news of some faraway place
Hopping over creaky floorboards, storing static
Against wool carpets and zapping Grandma’s knitting
Vision wrinkling in warm shades like mangoes, oranges
Frisbees dropped, under hammocks or crude tents
Saving scrapbooks from attic cobwebs–pasts, before pasts
Taping our precious scribbles religiously until our
White ceilings converted to memorial mosaics
Dragonflies and Vs of geese enchanted our daydreams
Off to some Everest or Yosemite where adventure lurks
Leather-bound journals lined tables clasping memories
And reminders to future selves to always hold dear
Your heart’s home: acres of beginnings, middles, and ends
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Poetry

Oh, Mother Nature – Karlee Sanders

the sky cries for you, my dear. when you’re sad, so are the clouds.

the sun shines for your effervescent smile.
flowers lift their heads as you walk by.
you’re one with nature, it’s like they look up to you.
or maybe it is you.
controlling them in ways that are impossible to understand.
not with your mind, but your heart.
yes, oh yes.
I can see it in your eyes.
such beauty could only be created by the most darling thing of all,
you.
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Poetry

Human Nature – Ivy Juniper Manchester

“Even the mighty succumb to human nature.
There is no beating the beating of our hearts,
No defeating the monsters we bred,
The demons we define as thoughts,
The poisonous lies dipped in honey
Which we so arrogantly accept as honesty.
We cannot overcome that which makes us strong,
Simply because we believe it makes us weak.
There is no denying emotion that we feel so fervently,
Simply because we fear its strength.
We cannot run from ourselves,
And we cannot be brave if we fear ourselves.
Despite the notion that we are invincible,
We cannot defeat ourselves.”

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Poetry

Observatory – Haley Ingram

I love it here.
the view reminds me of life. 
The sky the way it paints over our hands and onto our skin,
The way the color doesn’t mix together as much as an artist would like it to.
The lead in our paints is heavier than we were ever capable of lifting, but it’s all we had.
It’s all we are fed. 
We closed our coffins with the nails we’re chewing on in hopes that
You need to be undead in order to make a move-
But I don’t want to kiss death anymore 
He leaves my body to rot 
My teeth hurt from grinding against him
He has violated
All of us. 
We are all iron cast replicas forged in the fires of our own hell. 
We paint our bodies with colors of the sky and call it identity. 
Nobody likes the night 
Everyone is afraid of the dark
Why am I afraid of the dark but find so much comfort in the makeup of hell?
We call ourselves artists, 
There is no artist.
There is only nature and our mimicry,
We feed on the idea of existing originality. 
Why don’t we open our coffins?
Let’s swallow our nails and puncture our throats
To allow the nervous words to spew into one another. 
Till death do us part-
He’s not getting between us. 
We are survivors in a world imprisoned by 
The impressionable weight of shackles
And strength to carry them. 
We are convicts in that we are happy together
So that cannot be. 
But in this moment. 
I love it here. 
The view reminds me of you. 
The way the sky paints itself and the willingness to relinquish power. 
The way I don’t want it to be easy to touch you 
The way no one can touch you.
Painting doesn’t make me an artist
But it makes you a masterpiece. 
I can lift you over my head 
And in this moment. 
Life is worth living.

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Poetry

Capgras Delusions and You (The Body) – Matt Grydzuk

Degauss the stars like cathode ray tubes using only your hands

The body first thinks explicitly in omens, or foretelling the end of things

Sleep less than intended; corporeality was tailor-made for you.


The body is just a suggestion, though, like the outline of existing

Akin to the stars lacking crystal clear imagery yet making shapes

Yet causing images in the night

And I sat and watched them unfold, shaking mildly, how beautiful.


How beautiful, the suggestion of form;

The existence of existence

Like wisps of stardust off the tips of your fingers and the rest of your outline

You are a degaussed constellation.


How beautiful the burning sensation; the smell

How beautiful destroying the innards

Like dying stars or a comet moving faster and then it’s gone

Creating outlines creating memories making

Sentences with your movements but no words.


How beautiful linguistics; complete sentences with two independent clauses

Intertwined to make the sun rise.

Watch it leave you like blood from the mouth, like stardust from the nose and eyes.

All other things beautiful like the suggestion of an outline; like actually falling asleep.


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Poetry

The Positivity in Glass Jars – Brooke Safferman

Four jars made of glass, lined up on my window sill

The mint green, 

the pale rose, 

the totally clear, 

the almost-purple.

The way the light shines through them makes me giggle

Sort of like the way your smile shines through my emotional walls of glass

Once so strong, now I’m so fragile

Your delicate touch could crush me with too much force(accidentally)

“Stay positive”, they say

So I draw on a smile with my lipstick tube but

Before I leave my room to enter the world

I pause to look at the positivity in glass jars.

 

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Poetry

Meta-cognition explained in Lithuanian (The Head) – Matt Grydzuk

The head

Chiefly, where pre-calculus goes to die.

And truthfully I don’t know much else about it, but I do know,

Or remember, that my mother told me always to be grateful

For what you have.

And I can’t say I was

Because so many self-inflicted head traumas starts to pile up when nothing

You do is perfect and you have to blame SOMEONE and

Knowledge of chlorophyll is always dying and you’ve never had a green thumb

Next thing I know my head is a graveyard and sometimes I kick over eternal lights to watch

The information flowing out like candle wax like

This is grey matter flowing through eye sockets like this

Is the way they wanted you to be when they called you stupid

Like you can live up to one thing if you just try hard enough

And when it hardens; becomes crystalline

If you hurled it at a man how far would he go

I still haven’t forgotten Newton’s second law or anything about Schroedinger

But what does that even matter

The Head

Chiefly, a device to move the body.

To tell it what to do.

But for every move this way and that there’s an eyelid twitch or a muscle spasm

Bartering, the product of battery indentured to the head my body is never my own but

I wouldn’t know

I’m sorry.


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Poetry

Maple Key – Harika Kottakota 

My magnum opus was a maple key, 
Imprinted pond ripples in amber  

A hundred journals worth of sins 
Rimmed it with azure  

My maple key rode majestically 
Upon the southern breeze

Tornado in the Church bell and 
Flames around the riverbend 

Devout insomniac, I stalked
My maple key barefoot into 

Jasper mornings–too ethereal, 
too intricate for untrained eyes   

I watched its azure streak lotus 
By lotus, but never land 

Without a star’s conception
In sync, that’s right–never in jest  
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