EUPHORIA
Today I’m filled with such a feeling of greatness and immortality
I must sit on my hands to control them from dancing
I find blinking a hazard
It takes too much time and leaves me in the darkness
When I could be seeing and living the manic colors
Everything in me is magnified and exposed
But no one seems to notice
The air caresses my flesh
And my heart beats faster
And my pulse pulses with the concrete rhythm of the song
Permanently playing
In my mind
I want to write everything I have ever felt before in my whole existence and
Paste them
on the walls
I want to dance with such balance and magnificence
That the whole world will want to dance too
I want to sing like the angels
To part my lips and have the loveliness of my song drop out of
The corners of
My mouth
And to echo into everyone’s ears and have a piece of my song glued into their minds
I want to be able to use my hands in ways I never have before
And to feel other people’s emotions like sandpaper on my
Tounge…maybe I will.
—Lauren Brown, 15
SEA FEATURES
She is erect
She is waiting
She is returning
She is sculpted
She is broad
Her shoulder blades
Her bones infused
With the strength
Of her imagination
Her desires understood
Coal burns outside
Her new windows
Her voice found
Old fears gone
Blood runs to her hands
Her life’s angels
Cradle her heart
New rhythms beating
Her skin promising
Clasps and warmth
Her wrists on my neck
Guy wires
Keeping me from tumbling
Syncopate my pals
And split my life lines
Into quatrains
She smiles to herself
And she is warm
And she is rain
And I lean into the weather
Relax into her promise
And settle
A few steps closer to myself
--Jerry Quickeley
ESCAPE
Arm in arm
we fade against the horizon
in a backwards birth.
We never existed
A great relief.
Life was a hallucination
Inspired by electrical spasms
Pounding in the matter
Of our brains.
Thankful to know
Only each other
And to be know
Only by one another,
Grateful
For the watercolor horizon
Comforted to be characters
Invented by the mind
Of a twisted writer
In a world
Unbeknownst to us
In a book
Unbeknownst to anyone
We sail away
Floating on intensity
And peace
Smiling sleepily
Beneath a gleaming moon
Setting off for a world
Of our own creation.
For a world of our own escape.
—Iris Moulton, 14
Untitled
As I watch from my window
A portal to they world abroad
An unfamiliar shadow looms
I focus on this form
A rival shadow
That points towards a trail of risks
Risks that daunt
That fashion to build a world so distant
—Luche Anyanwu, 15
The HAND HAS TURNED by Celena Glenn
The hand has turned
In the streets I must mourn
we the people
we pretend we spring the earth on our tongues
only the wind will continue to blow
this land does not need our filth
I persuade the sleeping to rise
I persuade this life to live in me
And I will no longer sit
Behind a locked bathroom door
With faucet racing to quiet the grunts of my fury
My disgust with this lost, forgotten marble
……for they have not turned their face
to the fact that this universe
is tired of filtering our carbon
are killing softly the light of the moon
with our street lamps and radiation
and can count all the starts before we fall
even if we cease to follow
this electron does not need negativity
for its opposite is neutral
and neutral is positive when persuaded
And live life as the sun
And the dead to, as dust
So that I can one day carry this universe
Like a metrocard to a new found world
WEEKENDS by Viggo Mortensen
Medicated limbs, lonely and greedy.
The nurse in me won’t let me leave.
Homemade illness hardens into sugar and batters
Do I have to watch tomorrow afternoon while you
When you start snoring, I’ll take the tray from FALSE LOVE
Fallen and eroding away into a selfless body
I’ll fall in too deep
Yet my brain lies shallow
Sick for Attention, dying for company,
you’re drunk for days.
Overburdened,
Moss-rotted branches
Heave slowly with the weak night breeze, like a failing heart, and
Graze the stone wall.
Your speech, draping
Your dry white tongue over your teeth. Red
Pinholes for eyes, and
Your mouth is a smudge.
Keep your face
Warm with the television and the maple drips on
The lawn chairs that
Flake and rust on the flooded terrace?
Your lap and tip you
Over so I can look for the rest of your lunch under
The green sofa
Cushions and probably find those pills you’ve been hiding. By the time
The clouds dim and I start seeing us in the windows, I’ll be drunk
Myself and ready to wake you for dinner.
-Shirley Daniel
My love is unconscious
In this perpetual moment
Immersed in tears and melodic sirens
I long to drift to a better place
Than this love
Depleted of narcissism and
Instantly in a muse to reply to my thoughts
Discovering some hidden substance unraveled in my skin
I’m falling asleep in a love induced wound
Trying to escape the sedation I cannot ease
I can’t escape it
This frustration boiled down to insecurity
Danger in the atmosphere rids love into a nimbus vision
Trapping empty coronas in my eyes
Searching for moral purity
And I can’t reflect my disguise
The outside façade to match the persona within
All because
I’ve lost this love
That I never found in the first place
