Category: 2020-21 Submissions

Cheese:
Ugh everyone eats me WITH something.
They put me on sandwiches, crackers, and even pasta.
Sometimes they just melt me.
It’s crazy. Who wants soggy chips?
It’s like I’m not good enough.
Why doesn’t anyone just eat ME.
What’s so wrong with simple by itself Cheese.
There are so many cheeses,
Why can’t one of them be meant
Just to eat with nothing?
There’s Blue, Colbyjack, Monterey, Swiss, Brie, Mozzarella…
And we can’t forget Cheddar.
I miss the old days when I was milk and
Everyone would just drink me.
I did love those cookie crumbs though.
I am like a sauce,
No one wants just me.
They put me in a dish to serve people and
Nobody even tastes me. Ugh!

Black silk paired with rose colored glasses,
For to see the wounds she herself buried deep,
Soon enough, enough time passes,
It’s as if she’s woken from a hundred year sleep-
The small and flattering waist,
Beloved by all in her glory days,
Unceremoniously replaced,
With an extra helping on a silver tray.
Every trend she had worn to conform,
Hideously out of style,
Her only accessory besides her pearls,
Is her stained and crooked smile.
Her youthful voice stolen like the mermaid,
She who once entranced the sea below,
Has rotted and hollowed and chosen to fade,
She who ran swift now hobbles slow.
“Madame Grey, I am at your service,”
Her newest conquest pronounces with pride,
Paranoid, she retreats- blushing and nervous,
Closely- too closely- he sits by her side.
They discuss the state of the world nowadays,
They never disagree.
Emotions stir within her, Madame Grey,
Perhaps a bride to be.
Spiderwebs decorate her once-stately halls,
Her formerly flawless mind- fragile,
States that he loves her, serenades her, undoes her,
Brittle laugh and that fanged, tainted smile.
On a fine spring day, a young lady arrived,
Young enough to be her daughter,
The spawn of her sister, and how she thrived-
Off of the flattery of Madame Grey’s lover.
Drama ensued, the niece pursued,
She who captured the concubine’s affections,
They sought out her blessing and received the next best thing-
The gift of her passing, freedom from her obsession.
They would never know how her wails pierced the ears,
Of the ravens that she knew, loved, and fed,
They would never know her deeply rooted fears,
Or the taste of the belladonna, or the grey ichor she bled.

Sonatas and symphonies,
Cursed to play on, play on in infinity,
Dwelling deep within your soul,
Searching for sense and control.
Stumbling through loneliness,
Like a damsel in distress,
A lighthouse to guide your way,
The melody yet plays,
Night fades into day
As you wander astray.
Catch a glimpse of she,
The cursed mystery,
Lift the veil and see,
Her tragic history,
Lost beneath the weeping willow,
Lost to starlight, gone to shadow.
One smile, one glimpse, one thousand songs,
The legend still lives on,
Fading into the mist,
The violinist, the violinist!
Dare you resist?
The song of,
The violinist, violinist!
Listen, carefully, just listen,
Throwing caution to the wind!
Hear the whispers, how they linger,
Dead ringer.
Fading into the mist,
The violinist, the violinist!
Dare you resist?
The song of
The violinist, violinist!
Etched into my spirit,
Her silhouette still playing,
Can you not hear it?
The song of the siren!

She makes fragile comparisons.
Wheedling battle wounds and horror stories from her mother, the dancer, and her father, the comedian.
She stares in the mirror, examining curves to come and curves already arrived,
Survive.
Bitterly swallowing the curse of age with as much dignity as she can suffer,
Is she the starlet, the chorus, the other?
Shadowed woman bleeding ash,
All things that rise must pass.

Is she the ballerina, the comedian,
The singer, the chameleon?
Will she seek solace in an arabesque,
A monologue, some dialogue a stranger wrote,
Breathing heavily with every note,
Will she?
Transcending the ash, mending the time,
Bending the world to reason and rhyme,
Can she?

She makes fragile comparisons.
The skeleton beneath betrays the skin she has destroyed in her wrath.
She sighs to an invisible audience, phantom applause
Greeting every word and every pause.
Melody in her tears and discord in her laugh,
As if cremating the corpse she will become,
Or has become, or won’t become.
As if reimagining chaos with one plié,
Six feet beneath a night at the ballet.

She makes fragile comparisons,
A second to the thrill,
And all the world could be a stage,
But every one is still.

We evolve and we grow as we go,
From a tiny seed planted in the dirt,
To a centuries old Sequoia,
Rooted deep within the earth.
Stretch our branches far and wide,
Choose a label, choose a side,
Echo their ghosts, and praise their gods-
No homeland for unholy thoughts.

At the beach I collect sea glass
The broken pieces that could be counted as trash
As it washes in with the tide
The sea glass is broken but beautiful
And each piece is like a different memory

Every piece broken and shattered
What once was a part of a whole
Like fractured childhood memories
A meaningless remembrance of a stuffed toy
From a moment that meant so much more
Or remembering a stranger’s first arbitrary sentence
That turned into years of laughter and inside jokes

Sea glass is smoothed from the sanding of the tide and time
A dull side where once a cutting edge was
Like faded memories that were once harsh
A story told so often
That the words no longer cut your tongue coming out
A faded memory of something that once seemed so pressing

Often the colors of sea glass repeat
Browns, greens, and whites in abundance
Like everyday memories
The ones that blur into each other
Until it seems as if you’ve lived the same day in a loop
Until the bus stop and high school feel like the only places you’ve ever been in the whole world

Rare colors are a moment of difference but still just more varying pieces of sea glass
A tiny shard of purple or blue just barely Spotlighted amongst the ordinary
Like the singular memories that don’t quite get pulled into forgetfulness
Like the day that you always remember
Not because it was extraordinary
But because you sat with family
Sweating in the late summer heat
And you laughed and talked
And the day felt beautiful and real

On each beach I visit
The ocean gnaws hungrily at the sand
Onto the fine grains the tide has carried trash and treasure
Among the shells and litter
Encased in salt and sand
I find lost memories

They had no wings to help them touch the heavens
So they climbed mountains
They had no light to guide them through the night
So they walked blindly
They feared nothing
Except the end of the journey

I fall down, down, down
the ground getting nearer every second
A little boy reaches out for me
I dance like a ballerina on his fingertips
Then land with a splat on his red, rubber boots
I twirl and dance with him as he laughs a big belly laugh
His boots take me to a trickling stream
Where we jump and splash until the boots get all muddy
Then they slip and slide all the way to the top of a tree
Where we wait for the sun to rise
At last, golden rays peak through the dark clouds
I let them carry me
up, up, up
Away from the little boy
And his red, rubber boots

Frayed threads frame your face
Your loving button eyes are starting to come off
Your soft brown fur stained with apple juice and mud
You smell of love:
A mixture of goldfish and tears
You wait on the bed all day
You hear everything, so many stories to tell
And no one to tell them to
Until the creak of a door invites a little boy in
And in that moment
Though your once perfect grin is falling apart
You never fail to make a child smile on a rainy day

I’m being pushed down, down
Toward the neverending depths of the mystery below
My thoughts are my own, but my body is not
All the blinding sharpness of the world is drowned by blurs
I try to resist but I have lost all control
The blurs get bigger as the pain slowly melts away
I let them absorb me as I’m pushed down farther and farther
I notice my eyelids flutter close, barely aware of anything at all
Then the blurs are replaced with a blanket of darkness and I’m carried away by the ocean