Category: Poetry

By Kennedy Henning

No one tells you poetry is a puzzle 

One where a lighter found the cover photo 

Before you could open the box 

Lick your fingers and place each word precisely 

Spark the projector in your head 

Paint out the sunrises you see 

Using the nail polish you wore in 8th grade 

Shake hands with the collection of people that keep their shoes tied in your brain

Always ready to cross the sidewalks you keep repaving 

Feel the gravel shuffle under the heels of your brown boots 

Taste the birthday cake your grandma baked you when you turned nine 

Speed up the video tape you put on upstairs 

Pause each memory with sticky glitter glue fingers 

Use broken crayons to write them in a coloring book 

Illustrate the frames with primary colors 

Refrain from fast forwarding melancholy scenes 

They always seem to be towards the finale

The airport is a graveyard for my mother’s tears

But everything sweet usually calls for a pinch of salt 

I don’t know what good poetry looks like

I only know what it feels like

Author Bio

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By Ian Erickson

Strands of desert – elongated yellow taffy. 

Pricks of trees – painted things. 

Another hour, windshield, gas. 

A forest before thoughts. 

Cold A/C – stings the edges of your face – your upper arm smoothly numb. 

The engine – roars as the car tilts up and smooths as the two lanes slope and slope.  The hours churn with the voices in the car beside you; an impactful voice – a crime podcast, The most recent song to stay in your head- poppy and clinging to the brain, with a dull undertone. 

Beside you, behind you, is your means to live.  

The painted road is brighter, the Park is up ahead.  

When your legs stiff up, and your back resumes its proper shape,  

When you pay the entrance computer, when your head swirls for a sign. 

When you find a brilliant space, front and focused, and the world turns silent for a moment. 

You race and try to hide your smile. People walk your way, already changed, they were there before  you.  

You walk, but your heart runs. You twist and strive…a leap of 

And the ground stretches into a railing, and there is the painting you have heard all about.  

Do you ever assign a weight 

To how the baggage inside 

Effects the art of the world?

You distract to ruminate. 

You apply logic to the senseless 

Placing patterns, miniature mazes, randomized lines. 

And your senses betray. 

Yes, there is a painting.  

In the Grand Canyon you can touch a rock that is 1.84 billion years old.  Yes, you are within a machine.  

The sun sets on smears of orange, rotations of brown, and slices of white.  

In the morning there is a chiming gift shop for tourists,  

A forgotten campfire low to the floor,  

A lost and found, and a passenger tram.  

Welcome. The clouds pass over these too. 

And in the morning, you see how they pass, how they travel.  Their casted shadows imprint into rocks, 

Altering the cliffs into dips and pure jagged peaks. 

The light replaces ghosts as they weave the canvas.  

The weight accomplishes. 

The engine is on. 

Not a clear day. 

Not a clear day.

Author Bio

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By Rachelle Zilavec

Someday, I’ll have to leave this place.
I’ll have to empty the drawers that traced to happy memories,
Lost in what others might call junk that could never fit inside a suitcase.
Someday, I’ll have to choose what to keep and what I can accept to lose.
But many of those things held the scent of somewhere I can no longer reach.
Someday, I’ll have to kiss my favorite things for the last time,
In hopes that I can hold them in another life.
My nostalgia shrine.
Someday, came too soon.
Someday, turned into,

One day,
I had to leave it all behind.

That day,
I lost it all to time.

Author Bio

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By Rachelle Zilavec

time can be short and time can be long
i sit and wait till the clock strikes dawn
until then i crowd myself in thought
with things i didn’t and things i fought
i dream a dream i wish i sought
yet I sit and rot
in a field of knots
my mind flow stuck in a clot
but i will not
forget the lessons i taught
to my future self
that girl i thought i lost

Author Bio

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By Rachelle Zilavec

Autumn-rusted leaves always fall, but they will always grow back.
That concept of autumn doesn’t exist here, but at least the trees are still green.
With all the changes the earth enforces us to see, there is always the constant:
Trees are still green.
But the growing metaphor of autumn-to-spring leaves
Gets lost in the translation because you no longer live in that familiar scene.

Imagine,
Looking in the mirror begins to seem foreign in the same way you are.
You look like you blend in because comfort is an image you have practiced in the mirror.
Your reflection taunts your attempts at becoming like everyone else
and your flesh can’t keep up with the constant threat of standing out.
There can’t be two of you,
so if you broke that silver border between you,
What version do you keep?
Which one do you believe?

In a space of unfamiliarity,
you can only rely on the consistencies,
One of them being,
a reminder,
That at least here,
trees are still green.

Author Bio

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By Bracken Valentine

red string of fate wraps around
my hand my wrist my finger pulls tight
presses against the heart line on my palm creates
a dent makes a valley leaves a bruise
pulls and pulls and pulls and starts
to burn to tear to bite into my skin makes itself
inextricable makes itself unbearable makes me
watch my hand go red go purple go blue
watch it pull tighter tighter watch blood
as it finally tears open skin. red string of fate
rubs skin raw leaves marks. circles tight enough
to cut. leads nowhere. leads nowhere. leads nowhere at all.

Author Bio

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By Micaela Olsen

These hills loom large ahead
and sneer with snobbish eyes.
For such gaze does antagonize
and shake my soul with dread.

Their silent stares deafen my ears
and bruise my heart of desire.
Their goal is to rob all things that inspire.
The longer I stay, they seize my life and free my fears

Barren brown cracks of dusty earth serve to remind me;
Life does not grow here.
My own broken body below proves I did not persevere.
For there is no tree or sanctuary among thee

Every day I walk to the base where they lay.
My hands stretch in gowpen to catch showers of dreams,
but these hills dried up all hopeful streams.
Now below I lay with these hands on a path to decay.

Oh hills, you are a cage!
Such malicious immovable mountains!
At every attempt to venture beyond, they seal this prison. I’m certain
this constant war I am too weak to wage.

My crusted lips sometimes slip through the bars to shout my woes,
but my stolen voice is caught in dusty winds
With the rusted gates closed, I stay trapped within.
My head bows to my rocky foe.

Beyond these hills, I cannot see,
but of the world blocked by them far in the distance;
I know of its existence.
and tall they stand to shield me from that place without mercy.

In times past, I once believed they welcomed me
to one day venture beyond their slopes to places unknown
and leave my current place which I had outgrown.
Their ridges are the gates of heaven that conceal new scenery.

But now with menacing looks, they mock my failures
These hills an unholy judge, certain to damn me
to this place that I shall never leave.
These hills forever hide my future.

Author Bio

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By Micaela Olsen

A conversation is a cup of tea
It passes through lips of women as they speak of years-old news, clutch their Bibles,
and mourn their unwrinkled hands
It drips off of tongues into pools of the glistening past to ease the pain inflicted on old bones
It speaks of life’s pleasures and woes on its hot breath to shroud its participants in blankets of contentment
But as these women trade words, their voices echo names of those they put on trial
And punished like Desdemona
To drink up the women’s discourse would be to partake in their sacrament
Those who indulge in the satisfaction of this ritual must drown their remorse in the blistering brew

Author Bio

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By Jonas Mufson

I am learning about things
I am learning about the meaninglessness
of words-
that the particles of realness are
smaller than our capacity for understanding

I am learning about things
Hearing words like
system and model and projection
Words like graphite gray lines
on blank yellowed pages.
Words like shapes and numbers and directions

I am learning to embrace
the comforting lies of my five senses
Like a traveler in space
embracing the heavy, spiraling love
of their birthplace. The very thing,
their once definitive rejection, now
a warm inexorability, which pulls them
towards matter that can be
felt.

And what a small price to pay.
How glad the traveler is to touch
the Earth, when all it costs them
is the bonds of their body.
How joyous the pilgrim will be
to finally evaporate.
To leave behind the void of model
To once again become
blissfully unaware of projection
as the system that is capable
of knowing itself becomes, once more,
a part of the system that is not.
A part of the system that only is
and never knows.

I am learning fear
Acidic and sharp and awake.
Fear that encompasses knowledge,
consumes it like a sheet consumes
a child in a room full of monsters.
I am learning that fear can keep you
on Earth, tether you deadly,
away from the void.

I am learning the meaninglessness of words
Words like void and real and fear
I am learning to live stratospherically,
to hold the void in the same hand
that holds the powder dirt and
the squelch-live soil and
the delicate yellow parchment.

By Lexy Morrow

The familiarity of your face on my screen
invites me to break this curse of silence
between you and me.

Can I skip past the niceties to ask
if you remember warm days diving under
crystalline pools, pretending our feet
were as pearlescent as mermaid fins?

Or how we made castles out of twigs
in the bushes of backyards where
we feared the parental invasion
that was the call of bedtime?

We soared above our suburban kingdom
on rusty bikes and sailed through
the storm of sprinklers hand in hand.

Do I cross your mind
like the strands of hair
you braided down my back?

I followed your voice like a well-charted map
through the thick of unmowed lawns
where we defeated the dragons that
were only our own shadows.

Now I only follow you online.

But the treasure is still buried beneath my bed—
bejeweled bracelets etched with your name
and long-kept secrets scribbled on
scrap papers for only our eyes.

I could type how I never meant to banish you,
even though the palace gates are now rusted shut.

But your freckles have faded and
Band-Aid battle wounds are healed.

So, I’ll write well wishes
and hope you haven’t lost the
golden key we held those magic years.

Author Bio

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