On my wrist
is a bracelet
Of the deepest shade of red
Fluid and straight
It stains my skin
And cuts deep into my flesh
Handcrafted with loneliness
And embellished with hate
It glimmers in the darkness
And is masked in the day
A gift
Sent from the boy
Who made my sheets reek
Of black love ...
On Your Wrist
TBD
On my wrist
is a bracelet
Of the deepest shade of red
Fluid and straight
It stains my skin
And cuts deep into my flesh
Handcrafted with loneliness
And embellished with hate
It glimmers in the darkness
And is masked in the day
A gift
Sent from the boy
Who made my sheets reek
Of black love ...
On Your Wrist
TBD
TITLE
NAME
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
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. ..
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. ..
Grey Bird
A.W. Lion-Cleaver
The grey bird beckons me to join him
Follow me! he says
Follow me!
A nest sprinkled with
Crumbles of ash
Built upon marlboro sticks
and poisonous leaves
Follow me!
Feathers grey, turn grey, turning grey
Feathers with knotted ends
Dipped in black
Feathers rough, turn rough, turning rough
Follow me!
Grey Bird
A.W. Lion-Cleaver
The grey bird beckons me to join him
Follow me! he says
Follow me!
A nest sprinkled with
Crumbles of ash
Built upon marlboro sticks
and poisonous leaves
Follow me!
Feathers grey, turn grey, turning grey
Feathers with knotted ends
Dipped in black
Feathers rough, turn rough, turning rough
Follow me!


PIERCE SANDERSON

OLIVIA MARWELL

ROOTS

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. ..

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. ..

HAILEY WEISEL


"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. ..

MADISON MORRISON
.jpg)
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.
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

