1. Loneliness is the bathrobe I keep under my covers. 2. Sometimes I pretend I’m in love--practicing who I’ll be. 3. My world is enveloped in black and I am warm warm warm, deep in the safety of exhaustion. I slide next to the grey cotton, wrap myself into the fresh bouquet of clean laundry. Who could my robe be in a year? Five years? Ten? I listen to the dull thrum of my metronome. Taste the sweet lulling of sleep. 4. Loneliness looks like hot steam. Stand under that flood until the water runs cold, until the skin turns numb. 5. Drains go dry in Maryland. D and O and E and J and R and J would know. 6. It’s cold here. 7. I wish I knew the difference between love and attention, but 8. I only live to ghost. 9. My absence, my lack, has made me idealize love into an intangible power. 10. They say the early bird gets the worm, but what if every worm caught doesn’t want to be someone’s meal? 11. The dopey lovers of my dreams, the 12. soft walls built up around them. I could never quite split through. 13. What I could do, though, is build up and up and up until I am alone, just breaching outer space. 14. While she may enjoy it for a while, 15. Sofie would ultimately flail herself into the abyss of open air. 16. A kind death it would be, but surrender nonetheless. 17. I can’t give up. 18. My pie in the sky, only ever wanting to avoir des atomes crochus. 19. Once, my bathrobe sat up in bed. It wrung sleep from its eyes, squinted at me in our dark. Who do you want me to be? It asked. 20. Right now? I say, as we nestle back into bed. No one. For this, pretending is enough. Sofia Divensis a 17 year old senior creative writer at Barbara Ingram School for the Arts. She enjoys disco and horror movies. Sofia hopes to live a long and fruitful life where she can indulge in her passions as well as learn more about the world around her.
Note: This piece was written during junior year.
How I Got Here by Emilea Huff
I was carried here by a bird, but not a stork, one with silk fingers for talons and a misunderstanding of gravity. I was born when I hit the ground, a crater, the moon’s recognized attributes, and I didn’t learn to walk until someone ran into me. I didn’t speak until I sang, but not until after I cried, or wailed, writing only after I learned when it was time to be quiet-- when the silence, dense, pressed against my cheek like the cold wetness of waiting for the bus in the snow. I aged when I left home, regressed when I came back, learned the value of standing still, of coexisting with the kitchen sink and the dish towel hanging from the oven like an estranged sister, barely there, connected by a thread or two. I made friends with the crack in the bathroom tile, the air vent above my bed, the claustrophobia of having a body, a form, something that breathes when it needs to. I became sick with ideas. Started writing with a pepto-bismol pen. Emilea Huff is a senior creative writer at Barbara Ingram School for the Arts, and spends her time in and out of school writing her heart out. She prefers to write poetry, but finds that she enjoys any form of writing as long as she’s able to express herself. She likes the idea of screen writing in the future, and plans to continue to read and write all her life.
Today, Tomorrow, and Somewhere in Between by Annabelle Smith
ephemeral
e-phem-er-al (adj.) 1. the time between innocence and knowing. 2. sitting in the garage watching lightning zip across the sky, / an ice cream cone melting in your hand. 3. a burst of sparks and glitter against a backdrop of stars. 4. the first brush of skin on skin. 5. hello and / what’s your name? 6. I spent a week last summer in Harrisburg, / weeding gardens and becoming as sunbaked as the soil, / and the time blew away like sand.
eternity
e-tern-i-ty (n.) 1. messages left in dusty beer bottles bottles / thrown into the creek. 2. the shape of your palm curled against mine. 3. words. 4. letters and notes written on crinkled paper / sealed away in the space beneath my bed. 5. wedding vows / a glimmer of gold around your finger. 6. New Year’s confetti decorating the carpet by the couch / with a garden of paper flowers. 7. popcorn butter stains on plush couch cushions, / like freckles on rosebud cheeks. 8. trailing your fingers in the shape of constellations underneath the velvet sky.
liminal
lim-in-al (adj.) 1. the feeling of pin pricks behind your eyes before you cry. 2. the bedrooms of children no longer there, / stuck in a fairytale gone stagnant. 3. buds on a pepper plant, / swollen with almost-bloomed flowers the color of lemons. 4. standing in an empty elevator, watching the floors tick by. 5. a schoolyard during summer vacation, / when candy-colored jungle gyms no longer sound like laughter. 6. an empty parking lot, / just a sheath of blacktop soaked in moonlight, / waiting.
Annabelle Smithis a sophomore creative writer at Barbara Ingram School for the Arts. She is a lover of words, piano, and Van Gogh's Starry Night, and can always be found with her nose in a book. Note: This piece was written during freshmen year.
Masonville TX, July 11th 2019, 2:55 am by Elizabeth McFarland
My hand’s pink flesh kissed up against the frayed cedar table with a splinter. A deadened wooden leech lays gentle in my palm.
And I yelp so loud that Matt can hear me outside.
So Matt, the guy who seems too cool for existence, in his same induced haze of half-sleep and dead-heat sits down soft beside me. He holds my hand like he would cradle a baby, tweezers clasped like a charm, he pulls the splinter out of my palm.
And with fears of wood impaling its- self in my paper veins, the deleriaty of being alive returns.
The porch is the lip of the ring of our house, which is our planet tossing itself into the space of absolute void.
And I wonder if Matt is breathing the same empty I am. He smacks me hard where the ribs meet the spine.
“Everything is good here,” he says, like nothing has been good here in awhile.
“Even me?” We lay back quiet on the concrete.
“Yeah, especially you.”
And we swing our feet off the porch to a cosmos that will disappear when morning arrives on our doorstep, gone forever.
And I feel it. We both think at the same moment,
Will we remember this?
Elizabeth McFarlandis a senior at Barbara Ingram School for the Arts with an affinity for Dutch beat poetry and Austrian economics. She's working on an essay collection and a book of short stories that she hopes to self publish.
Note: This piece was written during junior year.
Sign Here after Dean Young by Heaven Angleberger
H The brink of a new friendship, of Hello’s and Have not’s. It’s home between Glory and Ink, three lifts of the hand. Never a hassle, but always written from the heart. e Everything that is and ever was, but remember the things that could have been. The center of a breath, a heart that beats with every sharp turn, each street that brings us to a one-way road. a A, with intertwining branches which bud from it, life, A, a loop of the hand and it shall appear. Stout as a teapot, first of 26. v A symphony of birds and bees, the beholder of flowers, views of sand warm beneath waves caressing broken shells. The number five. Parts of myself that remind me of how I got my name. Vulnerability. e The snow right before it hits the ground-- beautiful in a moment, to be gone in the next. The silence of love, but also sharp. Envious, Exaggerate, Elate, Elegant. Curves, but then straight line(s). n A narrow rainbow at the end of a signature, my signature, horseshoes thrown but never sticking the landing, N, a letter who doesn’t need punctuation. The end of this poem but not the end of this name because this name will reach to the Heavens, this name will reach every U-turn in this Universe. Heaven Anglebergeris a senior Creative Writer at Barbara Ingram. She enjoys pursuing the art of poetry and collaborating with her peers. She has three siblings and seven pets, but always finds time to do the one thing that she loves--WRITING! Note: This piece was written during junior year.