Editor’s note: This poem was a finalist in the the 2021 Gaithersburg Festival Youth Poetry Contest.
The Rain of Today
The sputter of raindrops on the steel trash can breaks the sound of my nib pressed on the thick Strathmore paper. My drawing is full of lurid details as if shapes and colors can cover and muffle the emptiness around. I can almost fool myself into believing such solitude is freedom.
At dusk, when the rain finally stops, silence is the loudest sound. The hollow I’ve tried so hard to seal feels wider. Sitting by the windowsill, I count scattered droplets dribbling down the glass and wait for the clouds to part.
Tomorrow, things will surely be better, I tell myself.
Allison Xu is a high school student in Maryland. She has won many writing awards, including Scholastic Arts & Writing awards, grade winner in Blue Fire Creative Writing Contest, first place in Kay Snow Writing Contest, etc. Her work has been published in Germ Magazine, Secret Attic, 50-Word Stories, and several anthologies. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, swimming, and playing with her beagle.
Buttercups sway in the wind on wispy stems, tiny fairies in grass forests, chirping silently of meadows and woods seeking to escape from tar and cement through cracks in sidewalks and at the fringes of parking lots, they lift golden bowls
outside stone temples like monks draped in uncut cotton swaths the color of sunrise surrendering to the kindness of strangers filling their tak bat vessels without a sound, each grain of rice shared
plants the seeds of compassion, the whole street becomes a sacred space, where the divine spark breathed into each soul links up in mutual aid, braiding into a garland of marigolds spicing up the air
with the blessings from a thousand hands, joining in leaps of faith, fragrantly ephemeral chains of flowers tying families, friends and neighbors into one Milky Way, an ethereal veil of citrine stars connecting different galaxies into one universe where
a banner of bold yellow letters builds a yellow brick path where heels click to reclaim home, which is not a White House, but a freedom plaza where people from all shades of the rainbow come to affirm that black lives matter
and yellow whistles stand guard in pockets or next to hearts, until they are kissed by lips calling for help trusting it will come to Stop Asian Hate, a wordless song of solidarity that all belong
Pacyinz Lyfoung is a French-born, Minnesota-grown Hmong/Asian American woman poet. Her art reflects her ongoing recovery of her Hmong/Asian heritage, documentation of the Hmong/Asian American experience within the broader context of the communities in which she lives, and contribution to the visibility of Hmong/Asian Americans within the fabric of American society. In DC, as a bike commuter, she has explored the District along streets and paths, up and down small and big hills, catching details at the slow pace of a bike ride. Her favorite places in DC are outdoors/nature community spaces such as the National Botanical Gardens, the National Arboretum, and the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. During the pandemic, she really focused on poetry as a means of building community and bridges among various groups, in solidarity in the struggle for racial and economic equity.
my friend Jack tells me about this new syndrome called surge depletion.
it’s like our human batteries are running low after working so hard to stay in place due to COVID, economic collapse, an election that resembles a circus with albino bears riding bikes through town, promising to give us a piece
of the pie, lying out of every orifice possible. it’s all i can do to get out of bed. i’m in a capture-and-release program but never released. i’m a kite in the sky with no strings. i’m a yellow mask without a face.
what’s a sane person to do? grin and bear it? eat more gummies? camp out for hours in front of a computer and embrace your digital self? it’s our first pandemic, people. we shouldn’t blame ourselves for surge depletion and ambiguous loss.
i say wake up, drink some tea, watch the sun crack open an autumn sky. hell, buy yourself some down time and forget about the cost.
What We Learn of Faith for Nick Bozanic
is to trust the heart. It’s like a trout in the river, swimming with ease and confidence, hunkering down under the fallen tree to rest.
Sometimes it breaks the surface, leaping into sunlight, splashing back into the water, gone, quiet, invisible, but there. Always there.
David James has published five books, six chapbooks and has had more than thirty of his one-act plays produced in the U.S. and Ireland. He teaches at Oakland Community College.
Image: Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Listen Up: Making Music from the Northern Lights – The Guardian, 12/22/2020
At the top of the North, Aurora hangs
curtains of shimmering light across the heavens
floats waves of color – green, purple, gold –
into the sky
And whispers to the world
The Inuit have heard it for years – selamiut
sky dwellers, the voice of ancestors
We’ve crossed over but we’re still here
Now scientists hear it too – whistling,
rustling, hissing, humming
They’ve captured the sound, explained it
Solar flares electromagnetic waves temperature inversion layers low frequency receivers
Forget the science
The sky is singing
Look up and listen
Star Light, Star Bright
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson
I never asked the stars to spell your name
or said the sun should rise especially for us,
and when the full moon went into eclipse
I never thought night darkened just for us
and us alone.
There’s something to be said for planets,
how they ride their measured rings
around the sun, and something to be said
for meteorites, those rocky tears
the cosmos sheds.
But let science say what can be said
about it all – it makes no sense to me.
I watch in wonder as the heavens
wheel and drink it in, enthralled.
So when you talk of perihelion
or perigee, event horizon or
ecliptic, I nod, then smile inside
and think, how lucky that the stars
aligned for us.
Toward Equinox
Animals first entered the imagination as messengers or promises. – John Bergen
A crow tells me about the sky tilts his head, folds his wings around him like a cape fixes his dark eye on me
Listen to me, he says or seems to
Squirrels practice brush-tail acrobatics in the trees plant acorns in the leaf-strewn ground
We promise the year will turn, they tell me or seem to
I picture a new day opening in the trees, trembling leaves whispering to each other
A terrestrial event no more magical than the turn of a page but how much more profound
Listening Notes
Woke up to news about music the radio lulling me with stories – not politics, not crime, not entertainment but music and our human need to make sound into something more – note, pulse, cadence, melody
Story 1 Archaeologists dig up a conch shell carefully crafted eons ago not into the expected drinking cup but a musical instrument
A French horn player cradles the conch, blows two notes – low and lower
Story 2 A scientist adds microphones to a Mars explorer to pick up sounds – the ship touching down, the planet’s ambient noise
Not exactly music of the spheres but don’t tell me Mars won’t find its way into songs
Don’t tell me the planets aren’t singing to each other
Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 80 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is Something Like a Life (Gyroscope Press). She is also the author of Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table. Zakariya blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.
Image by Rochus Hess, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons
Reddish-Brown are the screws buried beneath the porch
Remnants torn down long ago, replaced by hard work
Built on the backs of the strong
Stood on the foundations of teamwork
Soaping threads makes wood swell to lock tight
Hex headed Lag screws bore deep until washer press and splinter into southern yellow pine
Splinters and crackles, fresh and dried the wood; feel the burn in the forearm, spinning
Thirsty is the soap it takes until it is filled, water clinging to the metal ridges, rusting
Father yelling, stairs crooked, his math incorrect and work shoddy
Blame put on me, not holding steady enough, not being sturdy enough
For soaped screws to be set deep into the stringers
Sun setting and daylight dying on another long evening
The ceiling above the bed does nothing to drown out the chatter in the night
“did you love your ex-wife?” Left unanswered to be forgotten
a man built on a foundation of ashes, but
When the screws rust away who’s left to hold up the porch?
I was born somewhere in California but have lived in Vermont for longer than I can remember. I’m used to cold snowy winters and walking up hills to get most places. Skyscrapers and flat land make me feel uneasy if I look at them for too long. It’s heartbreaking to me, that soon I’ll be looking for graduate work and most likely leaving Vermont behind.
