Tag Archives: personal essay

Poetry

Inside Out – Camryn Garrett

The beach is where I become one.

Grains of sand form my skin,

Waves help me to swim.

Rays of sun combine to form my glare

and seaweed dangles in ringlets down my back.

Grains of salt are the Spanish words that fall

out of my lips.

They surf along the waves where Castro

will not find them.

Though I have the legs to stand,

they all,

water,

              the surf,

                                the sand that forms land,

have more of a voice than I,

a spoiled little girl from Havana.

Papi built his business

              right

              up

                  from the

                                ground,

like the seeds of Mami’s plants.

When people stopped wanting cars, Papi could make do,

              just like the broken stems of weak plants do.

But the problem is when no one needs.

Castro says Papi doesn’t need to own,

so out of Papi’s hands and into Castro’s the cars go.

Once, we were not far from being rich

But with

              Mami and Papi

              and

              Jose and Maria

              and

              Clara and Carlos, plus a new baby on the way,

              we’re so much farther from wealth now.

Especially since our new houseguest,

the one they call Communism,

takes so much from many,

and says we’re all to get the same.

Why doesn’t he understand

not every seed can grow with

a measly inch of rain?

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Poetry

Way Better Than Kettle Corn – Brooke Safferman

I fall in love with the idea of you

Of people and places and things but oh, mostly you

Of some sort of better life out there

Of greener grass and sweeter smiles.

Maybe if we close our eyes

And wish and hope and dream that things will be all right (ha! A-okay!)

Then hey, maybe they will be.

And maybe the sky won’t seem so dark, and my heart won’t feel so damn h e a v y,

Because when the sun rises, our sighs fall,

and tears of joy trickle down my chin, making their own way down to you and

your caresses, so strong yet so gentle all at once.

Oh, and you fail to see the things about myself that I personally like the least, and

oh, you make me feel like the girl I wish I could see when I look at my damn self in the mirror.

You make me feel like I could never fail, at anything, ever, at all.

Because when our foreheads are pressed together, and I taste the salt on your tongue, I fall in love with the way leftover pizza lingers on your tastebuds, the feeling of chills on spines, and electric shocks on fingertips.

You make me feel like I’m already the person I could only dream about becoming one day.

The way you look at me, oh, you belong somewhere else, like in my bed or on my table, and I take a swig from the bottle when I finally come to the conclusion that any one of these days, you could just walk right on out of here, with that intoxicating swagger like you always have and that little smirk that always taunts me, and you could find something new that you like better.

Like hacky-sacks, or homemade Kettle Corn.

But oh – you make me feel so damn raw, and I mean that in the best way possible,

Like I’m still a little child with skinned knees – with you I might be bruised from before, from the past, but I’m still secure and safe with you now, and

When your fingers slip their way into my own, the way your little smirk slips onto your face, I smile, too, because

I know you like me way better than Kettle Corn.

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Poetry

How to Smile – Brooke Safferman

Sleep, or something else quite calming seeps into my veins

Soporific, exotic, quixotic –

your free spirit kindles the kindred flame within my own heart,

and you tell me that you are glad that I exist

And then you let me in on a little secret

Together we fly away, in an airplane and only the two of us can feel the air

Streamlining through an atmosphere in which only we can breathe,

the two of us

and I forget how to say your name without a gasp of air escaping through my parted lips

But yet, I never forget

How to smile.

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Short Story

Existential Angst (Act II) – Esteban Mayorga

3 months later…

Act 2: A Whole New World

Well, hello there. It’s been awhile hasn’t it? A great deal of shenanigans has been going down, and I haven’t really had time to tell stories.

But, the final push is planned for tomorrow, and there’s a break in the fighting as both sides prepare; so I guess i’ll just have to take this time to tell you what’s happened so far.

I went back to Valentina and told her about my change of heart, and she lit up like a christmas tree. She actually hugged me. I’m not saying it wasn’t nice, but it was just such a sudden shift from her usual stony demeanor, it caught me off guard.

She really believed what she was doing was right. With all her heart, you could see it in her eyes. She gained my respect right then. She started talking about her plans to free the rest of us, and what she would do after we won, and she said it all with a smile on her face. Admittedly, the smile was a little disconcerting when she went into details about how to best massacre government forces, but the sentiment was still there.

So I asked her, “what now”? Her response? “You have no idea what you’re in for”. And she was right.

Every day, instead of going to our lonely apartments after school, we met somewhere on the city. It was usually either an abandoned building, set to be torn down soon, or at some of the larger apartments owned by members of our little army. We trained, and we planned, and we gathered equipment in secret, preparing for war. There were only about 20 of us in all, and most of us were college aged or seniors in highschool , but there were only about 200 government officials all in all, and the majority of them weren’t powered.

Training was hard at first, and I wasn’t exactly trusted by the rest of the group. After all, would you listen if some supposedly crazy powerful kid showed up and you had to treat him as a leader? Of course not, people have to be shown their leader’s capabilities. Well, after our first raid, they never questioned my ability again.

We had been preparing for our first operation for about 2 weeks; a small raid on a supplies warehouse. If all went well, it would look like some Private Military Company or Research Corporation had ransacked the place, and the government would have no idea they had a revolution on their hands yet.

Unfortunately, things did not go well.

A security guard went for a bathroom break at exactly the wrong time; he found davey and I climbing in through the ceiling vent. I knocked him unconscious in less than half a second, but the government are clever bastards, as it turns out. They had these implants put into all the guards, and if any of them experienced excessive physical trauma or unconsciousness, an alarm would be set off.

So the alarm went off, and the stealth operation turned into a war zone. Everything was on fire, then it was all frozen, then electricity flowed through the ice and metal support beams like a raging river. We used our powers without control, causing maximum damage to everything around us. I didn’t kill anyone, but i’m one of the few that can say that. The whole world was chaos after we got rid of all the guards, and we knew there were more coming, but half of us couldn’t even walk. My legs were fine, so I had to carry each person individually back to one of our hideouts, and then run back for another. In the end I carried all 19 other members a mile back to base, and then I threw up and fell over.

When I came to, Valentina gave me a rundown of what happened after I passed out.  We won, but all of us were injured in some way, and our excessive display of force caught the eye of the government. They didn’t know exactly who we were, but they knew someone was planning to take them down.

“But hey,” she said, “at least no one is going to give you crap about being a kid anymore”. And she was right. Finally, they accepted me as one of them. It was pretty wonderful. The only short jokes I heard were affectionate, and I felt like I finally had a family.

So we carried on. We refused to give up, instead, we declared full scale war on the government that oppressed us. We got sympathisers to set put up posters advertising the movement when no one was watching, we took territory on the edge of the city for ourselves and stopped going to school altogether. The government tried to label us as terrorists, but it wasn’t working. We were winning the hearts of the people over, and our numbers were growing. The total student population was only about 2000, and the members of our little club swelled from 20 to 30 to 60 to 100 quickly. That doesn’t mean we weren’t without our losses. Davey got killed early on, and Valentina only has her left arm still attached now. There have been others, but I don’t want to go through their names. It still hurts.

We’ve taken more than half the city now, and the only thing left of any importance is the high school. About a quarter of the student body sided with the government. A couple people who hold their convictions high and believe they’re doing right. A whole lot of psychos that just love killing and see the government as their best possible employer. And a few that just don’t know anything else in their life or how they could get on without big brother watching over them. Those are the ones I really feel for. But nothing is going to stop us now. We’ve come too far, and I still haven’t taken a single life.

I’ve never wanted to kill, or even hurt others. I hold it as one of my highest moral achievements that I haven’t killed anyone in this bloody war.

But tomorrow, if anyone gets in my way, if anyone gets in the way of the freedom my family has died for, that my family has sacrificed life and limb for, I will put them in the ground.

And I won’t lose any sleep over it.

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Essay, Flash Fiction

My Favorite Place to Be – Alex Esterline

As I walked up to the brick building in the sweltering heat of the summer, I stopped on the hill to take a look around. I was surrounded by busy French streets and the smell of a bakery torturing those who passed by. Looking at the building, I saw a sign that read “Auberge Internationale de Québec”. When I walked inside I was greeted by a building as warm as the heat outside and with a glossy wooden interior. The building, itself, was an adventure. With no signs, except those in foreign script, each room was a mystery. After checking in, there was a strenuous trek up three flights of narrow, wooden floors that creaked endlessly. I endured as my suitcase became heavier, heavier, heavier, and lighter, finally. That night, after having reached the end of the hallway and located my room, the walls became illuminated by only the city lights and the glow of the moon. The buildings seemed to breathe and come to life with their phosphorescence. And although I had to get up early the next morning, I saw on my bed that faced a tall window. Through that window, the city lights could see my legs curled up into me as I watched without blinking. A bridge cast its glare on the river below. As cars passed through the city, their noises were barely audible over the music that blared from a stadium nearby. The city spoke to the music, as it’s heartbeat became the pulsing bass that could only be heard by those who were truly listening. Warm summer air poured through the windows and my eyes couldn’t part from the current view. Hours passed and sleep still eluded me. But I did not care that I had to wake up at six in the morning, because I was with my best friends- the stars. I did not care that I had to wake up at six in the morning, because the city wanted to see me. I did not care that I had to wake up at six in the morning because I had found complete comfort in this youth hostel 945 miles away from my home. 

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Poetry, Prosetry

Perspective of a Man – Karlee Sanders

every sunrise,
every sappy love quote,
could never be as beautiful
as the words her fingers wrote—
in the sky
connecting constellations
to the moon.
maybe it was the way she looked in the night air.
the picturesque white light on her face,
she was all things innocent and as innocuous as she could be.
but when the moonlight fell upon her fair skin,
she was a wildfire of blue and purple mixed with the almost fluorescent light and soft brown in her eyes and hair.
she could’ve outshone the sun.
not a soul on this planet could ever convince me that she was flawed in any way.
the way she touched my hands ever so carefully made me feel intoxicated with the inane butterflies she always rambled about.
when our eyes met that night, we were a part of the same dark sky we wore on our shoulders.
we were stars.
and nothing else mattered.
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