Student Poetry Collection: October 2023

Childhood Seasons

In the shade between our houses lived a bleeding heart

that of the earth and one day to be mine

That was the coldest place in summertime

where the grass always felt damp on my bare feet as I tiptoed to the gate

into the backyard with the swings that squeaked

Sometimes playing by myself like an only child

Training wheels and frightening, fat caterpillars in the sandy part of the garden box

Carrot tops kissing my knees hello and goodbye when I balanced atop it, pretending to be a tightrope walker

An autumn ritual I still indulge in is the crunching of dry, dead leaves beneath my shoes

I never wore sunscreen back then

Discomfort only came to me in winter:

a lumpy coat with a backpack over top,

seams of socks digging into me, making indents, leaving lint between my toes

where I'd rather feel smooth particles of sand at the purple park

Lie down and fill my hair up with it

I'd get so dirty and I wouldn't even care

But yeah, winter has always been hard

This one time on the walk to kindergarten, just out the door

I slipped on ice and landed on my face

Mom carried me inside, only to make me go later anyway

with a goose egg on my forehead

So embarrassing

"It's a miracle!" was a remark at the fresh, high snow that made my mom laugh

My first winter memory, it's still fond

Springtime brings daffodils like my granma once got me

They're still my favourite flower solely for that reason

Minority seasons are my favourite because so suddenly they turn into extremities

or maybe it's not so sudden and I've just been too busy growing up to realize that

Jude Lorenzen

Untitled

There will be no flowers at my funeral. There will be no white lilies stuck to cherrywood casket, there will be no pre-wilting roses or orchids weeping in the iron fist of a father or Forget-Me-Nots in a sisters palms… Instead, I imagine my funeral as I am: there is a thing lost at sea. It is weathered by salt water and unanchored. It is sinking, at my funeral, the sky opens her mouth to pour. At my funeral, the river overflows. Flowers do not grow underwater. I learned this from a sister. I learned that grief is a thing of threes: there is no room in a mourning house for a fourth flood. I live in rooms full of water and shipwrecks. I do not miss the flowers. Really, I have never seen them. At Night, I dream of a sister I’ve never met. She has no head. Just hands. And she holds me as if my spine was always meant to be bent. Curled into her arms. Cradled. I dream of funerals, and home grown alliums. I dream of newly dead sons. And their mothers. There is ivy tickling my chin, soft earth a cushion underneath my heavy skull. Truthfully, I am already there—I hear the soil is warm this time of year.

Fern Waniandy

Fiamma and the Infirm

When I started saying that you have to love somebody a lot to show up in their dreams

You with the prey shape

You with the open blue lips for your little blood sugar cookies

Doting on the wetness I had just yawned into my eyes

I materialised between your legs on your big bed

In your log cabin like a ghost you had summoned with the complicated heat of your desire 

You were wearing thick wool socks and scratching your husky behind the ears

When you looked down at me, your eyes were alarmed and unkind

You wanted to touch me so you did

Not let me at you

No matter how much I whined, the husky must not have existed before I left you

I was blocking out a costume for Fright Night in the house by the sea

I had a fuzzy police hat, but nothing to wear with it

Mama tried to put me in a wig made of soft clovers 

I could never be embarrassed by how desperately and profoundly I wanted to charm you because it was the single

Purest want of both our lives

Outside of the house by the sea I spoke to somebody’s daddy in German but he answered in delineated English

Then asked me with sudden gentleness if I was a spy for the Fatherland

Before you stopped showing up, an empty nightclub made of concrete 

I bent over the cold railing and shouted at a man in the vast pit below, “Have you seen a little white square of paper with German words on it?”, but I was making everything up

Because I left for Stuttgart and never saw you again

Because there wasn’t any red in your thin black hair anymore

Because you looked young and pale and oppressively harmless

Because we are all going back in time

I didn’t know how else to get to the woman who looked like you in my generous and faithless peripheral vision

When you called out to me my legs gave out and I knelt by your swivel chair

With my forearms on the armrests like a dog

If we went ten more years back you wouldn’t be married, if we went twenty more years back you wouldn’t be moribund, and if you were my age you might not even be so soft and ill in the brain yet so I might really have

Licked your nose if you hadn’t started laughing

Emma Pemmann

The clock in the darkness.

Lonely

She sat in the darkness

 waiting for the Lark to sing

The itch doesn’t pass, the need to grow the tree

But the flowers do not last in the darkness

Alone

What must she do, but

Turn down the lamps,

Quench the dying hearth,

 and Face her own darkness

See the line:

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

DueDay

But not today

Relief comes tomorrow,

Today we slave away to face the darkness

And banish the Lark’s song so that we might

Focus

On the paper to become.

And slay the demons that spring from the tardy pink slip

To beat the army before the clock ticks,

Tick Tock, Tick Tock,

The Mouse runs the clock

Bang goes the hammer

And smash, 

The Mouse Drops.

Avani Carstensen-Sinha