(CANDLE, MIRROR) REVIEW
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poetry


Not Mad Only Mildly Disappointed
​
by Sofia Divens

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 Divens  is 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 Smith  is 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 McFarland is 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 Angleberger  is 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.

​
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