“No No Fun”

Jakob Womer

“Our Reality”

Inna Shargorotski

“We were friends back then, in a way that everyone is friends in kindergarten.” We were friends back then, in a way that everyone played with each other during recess time. But now, our reality seems too difficult for us to process it. Everyone is either on their own trying to succeed in their lives, while others hide in their own personal corners. Where time never stops, to return all the memories that were created by us. Where love disappears and never returns back to us. Where laughter and joy tends to take a break from us. This is our reality. The truth that we didn’t think would be revealed. If only we knew how to act and be distant from one another. If only we knew how to warn each other of our “perfect” world. This could’ve been so simple. This could’ve been our dream. This could’ve been our typical friendship. If only we wanted to. If only we cared to. If only we tried to. We just gave up on ourselves. On our friendship. On our future. We still can forgive each other and our lame excuses. We still can respect each other, even though we aren’t on the same page in life. Both of us have no clue what we want from each other. Both of us know we don’t miss each other. Maybe just our pasts. Of our silly kindergarten friendship. Of our little clueless hearts. “We were friends back then, in a way that everyone is friends in kindergarten.”

“Forgotten”

Elena Hymes

“Run-on”

Troy Walters

That cold fall air, nipping at my skin, took me back to days of pumpkin pie steaming on the windowsill. I remember you’d take me out here and we’d just talk and talk, the smoke from your cigars covering your face in a fog of misplaced memory and shooing away the gnats that loved to swarm the porch light. You would tell me the stories of sitting out here with Mom and stories of her stories of her life before I took it away from her the day I was born. You’d always let me sit in moms old rocking chair. I always thought I was taking your comfy chair from you, until that night I stayed up too late and saw you out there, alone, smoke covering your face, wistfully staring at moms chair, hoping she might take a seat and talk to you one last time.
I couldn’t comprehend how you were feeling back then. But now, as I sit, alone, in this rocking chair that creaks every time I move, I can’t help but stare at the empty wooden chair that used to hold my father, so grand, taller than the clouds of smoke that cover the wrinkles I can’t seem to remember the shape of, and I remember the incredible man who taught me everything I know and now rots, rots in that backyard where we would play, rots under the sun we would pitch tents to hide from, rots under that grave marker that i crafted with my own bare hands, rots in my head as the memory of your booming voice fades into nothing.
So I smoke, now, dad, to shoo away the gnats and blanket my eyes so I don’t have to look at the chair that holds you no longer.

“Red Manhattan”

Cesia Pino-Mercado

Untitled

Hannah Bouchard

Sometimes I look to her and I feel empowered. She is such a strong woman. To know what I know about her is like reading one of those horror non-fiction war books in history class. The type of book you can’t imagine as real, the one nobody likes to read. But I did. The things that happened to her, I would never wish upon my least favorite people. She is brave.

Sometimes I look to her and I see a shattered mirror. Fragments of her are a part of me. The good ones that everyone praises and the bad ones that manifest deep within me. I will know her for the rest of my life and beyond. She will only know me for a part of hers, not all of it. I hold her dearly in my heart, the way she needed to be when she was just an innocent little girl in a cruel, evil world. She was hopeless.

Sometimes I look to her and I pray she loves me, like she loves her solitude. But she can’t. I am her. I am everything she doesn’t like. Something she despises. Something I can’t change. Something that twists a knife deep within my chest, piercing my heart. It makes me choke on the mouthfuls of blood that want to pool at her feet and scream “I love you”. I look to her as if she was the one who strung the stars in my night sky. But each day it feels as though it is her goal to pluck each and every one from it. Crushing them in her palm and dumping them in the treacherous murky waters known as my mind. She is precarious.

Sometimes I look to her and I want to change. She spent long hard years carrying me, nurturing me, supporting me, just for me to be something she can’t stand. I would carve runes into my flesh, reorganize every bone in my body, change anything and everything for her. But I can’t help feeling as though she does not think the same as me.

She is “Mom”.

“Living Under the Shade”

Mahimn Dave

“After school”

Kaitlyn Valenti

I sit in my trunk observing around me. At 2:06, the bell rings, students flush from the building, flooding the parking lot, eager to go home. Engines yell awake and friends catch up. After traffic dials down, and everyone leaves, the lot grows quiet. Small gusts of wind blow the trees, making them whisper the only song they know how to sing. Skinny stems sprout from the ground, giving the field a great deal of hair. Somewhere in the belly of the trees buzzes a soothing sound like it’s alive. I stay crossed-legged, my foot falls asleep buzzing with the trees.