Aroha (pity)

Dirt roads and ragged clothes on
emaciated children, pitied by those
cut from the soil, rich with compost,
in the West.

Streets paved with potholes,
and blood pools, seeped red
with road kill, that will
find a new home inside
the stomachs of those without one.

Arms ache raw with
rotting bug bites,
dark feet scarred with
untreated gashes.
Hot nights endured
with dreams of a
modern heaven known as
air conditioning.

Houses decay under heat,
swelling feet find relief
on a stranger’s tapa cloth.
Close your eyes. Imagine
a world where the brown
dirt that cakes your skin
runs down your body in muddy swirls
that will disappear down a drain.

Wake up to the moonlight.
Sweat slick on your skin,
thick cream on your feet,
cicada’s call from the night,
and covering your body is
a white cotton sheet.

Stephanie Bennett is an Australian student currying studying Creative Writing in the United States.

Art by Florence Liu 

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Caribou

He, a practiced piper

Poked holes in my windpipe

Teased notes of seduction

From this homemade flute

Caught you with a butterfly net

Weaved from my hair

And locked you in my ribcage

The bone splinters keep you

Still

Check the back alley dumpster

His drive­through graveyard

Take his leftovers

I

Am his leftovers

Give him my skull

So he’ll stop asking for head

He never looks down anyways

Wrap yourself in my hide

To mask your scent

Between subway rides

And under park benches

When he asks for your tongue

And he will ask for your tongue

Cut out mine

Keep yours locked behind

Teeth stained yellow and red

Empty my stomach of the acid

Forced down my throat

Swallowed by bruised lips

Fashion a drawstring pouch

Tie it shut with braided ligaments

Run

In case he catches up

Pull the pins out of my ovaries

Don’t forget to throw

Before they explode

Into ovum shrapnel

That scared him more than me

Bind his wrists with my small intestine

After the explosion

Set fire to the kindling that was my hair

Carve the fat from my chest

Marinate it in the remnants

Of my menstrual blood

And make him swallow

By Emily Boyle

Emily Boyle lives in Beaver Island, Michigan, and attends Interlochen Arts Academy as a senior. 

Art by Jules Ventre

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4 AM; The Wall a Headrest

Things get out of my

head, crawl back in,

toss my brain around.

I’ve got some muscle

in my neck, I’ve been

carrying a lot up there

recently. It’s too cold,

it’s too warm, i’m

too weary to adjust the

thermostat. My

feet are dirty, I’ll

wake my mother

if I take a shower,

I smell like the leaves.

I wonder if they miss

their branches or

if the responsibility

of living up there was

too much to handle so

they just let go, fell

fell fell to the ground,

let themselves become

brittle, waited for the

next autumn to come

around so they’d get

some touch again,

some warmth, something

to remind them that

they’re not as alive

as they once were.

 

 

By Tara Brooke

Tara Brooke Teets is seventeen years old and a junior at East Hardy High School. She has been previously published in Canvas, and has attended the West Virginia Governor’s School for the Arts for Creative Writing.

Artwork by Kate Graham

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In Memory of Emzara

The world is ending soon, my love. In two
days’ time, tectonic plates will chatter teeth,
collide, muss up the golden mean, imbue
God’s weariness with fractures underneath
the sinking sea. I want to take an old
approach—dear Noah and his ark, infused
with elements of television: bold
and artificial roses grown, tokens used
to pair off passersby whose urge to pro-
create ensures our race’s breath. Relieve
me, knead me, slip and drag me into co-
existence. Skip the rite, forget to grieve.
Ignore the trembling ground and seizing foam;
I’m waiting in an empty house, alone.

By Fiora Elbers Tibbitts
Fiona is a senior creative writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Artwork by David Gordon

 

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Post-Partum

Touch my home. Touch my
walls and tablecloth and the coat I bought my son; he
will be a small blue boy, blue like paint,
and his round hands
spell out something like milk or salt.
I want him to sleep in the crook of an avocado.

 

Night breaks but does not open.
you are a beautiful woman
said the blue boy. Now, once he is here,
I see that he is blue
like an egg in the dark.
He leans in from a window that wasn’t
there before, kicking his toes against the wall
as he looks at the pink boy in the cradle.

 

Open this jar for me, I ask.
Our yarn has been cut, but open this jar for me:
see, it is filled with childhood and melted
plastic.

 

By Sofia Haines

Sofia Haines is a senior Creative Writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

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Make Room

I. Unearth

I cut an umbilical cord today. Plastic,
raw, weakly bound to an animal found
buried in my closet. Long ago

in a den, a taxidermist
foraged its seams for loot, wary
of sewing attachment. Thievery

turned to alchemy. I coddled the rabbit
on a leash, buttons to gold. Its belly
swelled with rainwater, bliss, later maggots.

II. Suspend

My bed’s canopy was a canvas. Violent foot paddles
launched a thousand upside-down ships, tufting waves
that fondled buckets of treasure.

Calmer seas invite grief. Pebbles for a game of hopscotch.
I catapult them through spilled milk; the sheet’s cerebral
film engulfs my wishes in three jumps.

III. Retreat

I built a shrine to her garden trestle on my bureau.
She harvests vines, I harvest dead flies. Our symbiosis
feeds off of order in pairs.

We share shut windows. Trapped pests
and leaves clonk the glass: prison inmates
surviving by the ebb of our dinner bell.

By Fiora Elbers-Tibbitts
A senior creative writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

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Sunday Dinner

The family comes bubble wrapped, prepped to eat over synthetic discourse.
Prayer first. The future’s passed around; patrons pile on the collection
plate. The oven is hot and the timer cheats. Women leap at the beep,
unrehearsed in their assembled domestic burst. Another spring chicken:
underdone meat, dry like chalk. She’ll learn. The men are robust with
compensating promises, raises and grease simmering at the table, lingering
green outside the confession booth. They lurch. A bubble pops and the
curtain drops. Chairs adjust, scrape back singed skin. Faith and heat
converge.

Fiora Elbers-Tibbits
A senior creative writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Art by Florence Liu

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The Bear

He noticed that the salmon took a moment
to breathe a sigh of relief when he tore them from the water
(am I god? he asked)
and thought he heard a wheeze of joy
from the snap of bones between his teeth.

The bear has prophetic dreams on nights
that are so hot that
he cannot swallow water. He sees a beer can
bent in half like a man shot in the stomach. The bear
becomes a vegetarian; he wakes in the morning to find
feathers stuck and bent between his claws.

There has been a question swinging in his ears like frayed rope.
He moves towards a nursery that pools
beneath the rocks a mile downstream. The bear reminds
himself to pray and thanks his mother and father for allowing
death a place to sleep at the dinner table.

 

By Sofia Haines

Sofia Haines is a senior Creative Writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

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