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PIERCE SANDERSON
OLIVIA MARWELL
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ROOTS
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UNTITLED

Trash

Asher Freund

Trash on the mother trail

On the mother trail

On the mother trail on the mother

Trail on the fucking

Dirt in the people’s trash

In the people’s trash in the child’s

Trash in the fucking

 

Stones.

Stacked high.

Just waiting for them to

Fall fall -

Fall fall fall

My whole.

Damned life.

Just waiting for them to

Fall fall fall fall.

 

Mountains falling

Mountains falling

Trash in another sky

In another sky

In the a brother sky in the fucking

Leaves are falling

Leaves are falling

Let's lie down among

Lie down among

Lie down among lie down a

Dogs.

In the dark.

Just waiting for something to

Eat eat -

Eat eat eat

Their whole.

Damned life.

Just waiting for something to

Eat eat eat eat

 

Animals are not so strange

No they not so strange

No they not so strange, no

Loneliness is nature

It's just nature

So damn nature, it's just

Trees might be home to some

Might be home to many

Might be home to few, or

Might be home to many

Might be home to

 

Fools.

M.D.s.

Just waiting for someone to

Drug drug,

Drug drug drug

Their whole.

Damned life.

Just waiting for someone to

Drug.

Women who are woman

Nandi Maunder

I.

Confession: I learned very early on that the only women that are women are white.

They don’thappen to be white. It’s never an accident.

​

I wasn’t a woman. I was black half the time and a woman the other half. There was nothing to

suggest I could be both, not at the same time anyway.

​

Black women could not afford to be black and woman.

​

But I remember picture of the long white dresses marching down 5th Avenue. While

campaigning for Women’s Suffrage, those women were white.

​

They were white and it was their whiteness that outweighed their gender. The right to vote.

“I had to choose between civil rights and feminism!” That’s what actor Jennifer Lewis’s

character, Ruby, says on TV show Black-ish.

​

Civil rights or feminism?

Blackness or femininity?

Femininity or blackness?

​

These are all good questions. Imagine having to divide up your body, until it fights for one cause or the other. Decide which parts of you are woman and which parts are black. You have breasts and a vagina, but they are some shade of brown. Your hair curls in unnatural ways even though it grows out of your head. Not proper women. Incorrect. Unworthy. Translation: Black women are not women.

​

“I chose civil rights!” Ruby tells her family.

​

II.

Lie: Black women only exist as a combination of hard exteriors, sensual hips swaying to the

beat, and without any emotion that isn’t anger.

 

Lack of femininity. Lack of white dresses. Lack of whiteness. Black women are not women and will never be treated as such.

​

Confession: I prefer to cry in private. My privacy is my haven. Black women need havens.

 

Aurora Perrineau, a biracial black woman, had her haven stripped away by a white man and two white women didn’t believe her. ..

​

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HAILEY WEISEL

Something

Asher Freund

all that i say really means in the end that

i just want to die in the garden you tend

devoured by all of the demons you fend

from all the heartbroken creatures you mend

like divers almost killed by the bends,

role a duck.

The Contents of a cabinet

Renee Ferguson

Someone I love so much keeps me up at night. With the banging of cupboards and drawers and the opening and closing of the fridge, with quiet footsteps on carpeted stairs and the sharp squeak of the third stair from the bottom floor. I heard her last Thursday and then I slept out on Saturday but she’s fumbled down the stairs every night this week, too petrified to turn on a light. ..

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HAILEY WEISEL
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"ONE RED SPRINKLE"
GEORGE TILTON-LOW

Walls  of  Ice

and  a  Heart  of  Glass

Grace Herbst

Lizzy said “Till this moment I never knew myself”

How can she not know her own self?

Well I didn’t know myself until I met you

Not heartless but scared

Closed off from those feelings

But you broke through the ice

The layers built up around my heart

You with your honesty that you used as a knife

The love you used as a painkiller

So I didn’t feel you break down the wall

But then you were gone

And I suddenly realized you had gotten in past the barriers

Broke through the chains that barred you from my heart

You left

I had never felt that kind of pain

Thought it would go away

That the mountains of ice between you and my heart would slowly grow back. ..

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MADISON MORRISON
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Transformation

Sarah Flynn

At the beginning of the summer, Kat wore white ironed pants and a Vineyard Vines hat. By the end of the summer, she sported dreadlocks, a rasta necklace, and deep bags beneath her eyes.

    She went to the all-girls private school on Broadway Street, known as the “house on the hill,” or rather the “house full of bills,” as us public school kids called it. At seventeen, most of her friends probably had internships, or volunteered at the soup kitchen downtown, or traveled miles to compete in math triathlons. Her first day at the pizzeria, as she stood with a Kate Spade purse clutched under her arm, I couldn’t understand how she ended up working at a broken-down place run by a chef who slipped rum into his coffee.

    At first, she was simply the person to call to take my Saturday morning shift when I was out late Friday nights. We worked together three afternoons a week. When the pizzeria was slow, as it often was during the midday heat, I would pretend to read my book as I watched her move around the small restaurant, folding the paper napkins in one way, staring at them for a few moments, then folding them in another way. She would do the same with the plastic silverware, putting both the fork and the knife on the left side of the paper placemat, then moving the knife to the right side, then reuniting it with the fork. She would do this for hours, finding things to arrange and rearrange, to fix then re-fix.

One time, after watching her work on one flower arrangement for an hour and forty-five minutes, I blurted out in frustration, “why do you do that?”

    “Do what?” she asked, peering at me defensively from behind her shoulder.

    “I don’t know. All that OCD stuff.”

    “Oh, um, my mom is a caterer. I help her with stuff sometimes.”

      ...

FALL

Anne Overton

it's that time again

when grass begins to fall off the face of the planet.

and the sky wants to take back everything it said before.

​

because it is mourning and twisting its words like copper into lumps and shoving them down throats to matchjust for laughs.

 

it's that time again

when elusive you creeps into everything

and "i am so in love with you"

and the crunching of leaves underneath bare feet floats into pure joy because i just thought of you.

but you are never here.

 

it's that time again

when we start composing in our minds and twisting together thought and concealing everything because this is communicative living, which is the basis of our society.

​

but we scream everything out of corruption

and we bleed tears everywhere we dance.

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STRAT TOLMIE
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"LIMANTOUR BEACH"

I Fell

aidan Niles

I fell

Fingers grasping at the air

Brushing every cloud

Lost within the depths of her stare

 

I trembled beneath her gaze

Pinned to my chair

Ensnared by her smile

And the color of her hair

 

Time slowed to a crawl

Space seemed to shrink

Electricity danced and sparkled

I couldn’t help but sink

 

We danced through the days

Stole moments in the gardens

In the springtime of love

Where the ground never hardens

 

With her the colors shone bright

Scented strawberries and cream

Caught up as we were

In our tangled little dream

Time held no meaning

Even as clouds turned to grey

For we revelled and frolicked

In the dimming light of day

 

Sylvan spirit filled our hearts

Elven mirth blessed our tongues

Savoring the wildness in our youth

Breathing passion in our lungs

 

But our love filled with flame

Rendered soon to ash

Torn apart in moments

Leaving nothing but a gash

 

I saw Camelot smolder

Watched its halls burn

Pierced by a lance

I felt my heart churn

 

I stared at the ashes

Darkened by my pain

Unsure what to do

And then came the rain

Grandpa

Andrew Cunningham

Michael grew up in 1950s Millbrae. His parents owned Hillcrest Pharmacy, a local pharmacy frequented by many Millbrae residents before the monstrous reign of Walgreens, Safeway and CVS. As a kid, Michael delivered prescriptions to the large homes in Millbrae’s hills. With a red pack slung over his shoulder, “Mikey” biked up the steep stone streets delivering medicine to Hillcrests’ customers. At 16, just as his youthfulness had begun to melt into awkward adolescence, he stopped delivering prescriptions. Instead, his father put him behind the counter where he helped his mother keep track of the pharmacy’s finances. With a knack for mathematics and detail, Michael loved it. You could find him there all the time, even on school nights and early Saturday mornings. Even now, when he talks about his father’s pharmacy, you can hear the pride in his voice and see the longing wash over his face.

 

 

One bright September morning, just a few days into his junior year, Michael opened Hillcrests’ front door to see a bright, beautiful young woman he’d never met sitting behind the cosmetics counter. ...

HAILEY WEISEL

Six Minutes and

Thirty Seconds

Helena Bates

“Stop rushing the slide!” the coxswain spits as we pick up the tempo, sending our boat surging through the unmerciful waters. “Swing together!” she yells. “Oars in together!” she repeats. Our legs fill with lactic acid, impaling us with small pins all over our bodies, as our lungs gasp for air. “Power ten, we are two seats behind the boat ahead!” We each count down the remaining strokes, yearning for air, yearning to collapse at the finish line. “One hundred more strokes” I tell myself. Despite the excruciating pain shooting from my arms, to my lungs, through my thighs, and all the way down to my feet, my adrenaline acts as an anesthetic distracting me from my burning muscles. The incessant yells of the coxswain blaring out of the speakers in the boat fade, and my sole focus shifts to the whirring of the carbon fiber shell as it glides gracefully through the water as the boat picks up speed. I sit in “five” seat with a starboard oar in hand, “squaring” and “feathering” up the blade as it weaves in and out of the water dancing in between each powerful stroke. My actions mimic the three girls ahead of me setting the rhythm, as I reflect the tempo to the four girls in the seats behind me. Eight girls gliding back and forth on the freshly greased seat tracks in perfect unison, accelerating the boat as we swing simultaneously, sending our oars sweeping through the turbulent waters. Perfect unison, the intersection of rhythm and sheer power, the seamless symbiotic relationship of woman and boat all capture the sole attention of my mind, after each stroke seamingly lifts the boat out of the water. My stupor of adrenaline brakes as our bow skips past the finish line, a hair length ahead of the following boat.

 

Seventeen hours a week, sixty eight hours a month, seven hundred and forty eight hours a year, all leading up to six minutes and thirty seconds of pure adrenaline. Each one of the races in my rowing career felt like this — it did not matter whether I was part of the boat in the lead or dead last, the sheer adrenaline ...

"BIRD'S EYE VIEW"
CARSON LEVITT
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