Written by Erin Keller
I found your shoes in the back of the closet.
The blue ones with the missing laces that
You always left by the door.
The ones I’d always trip over.
They still have mud on them from the last time you wore them
To check the mail, in the rain.
They’re still here, waiting for you
To walk through the door,
Barefoot.
Written by Cren Boyd
When I was 7
I learned how to multiply.
Burying 2x2 in a melting mud pile,
Digging out a way to count my life,
I let the math
Consume me and
Teach me that
By multiplying the shattered glass on my kitchen floor, By the inches in which my evergreens grew,
You could get the weight of my childhood.
I let its burden embed itself into me,
Pry its way into my milestones and
Cling on to the idea that
3x2 is when you read
4x4 is when you drive and
6x3 is when you descend from the stars.
Written by Edie Dahlander
She never belonged to me. She never belonged to anyone. She existed in a world outside of our comprehension. She was somewhere else entirely. And I selfishly wish she wasn’t. I wish she could just be mine—a special thing to hold. Something to prove my fears about myself are wrong, that the mud caking my eyelashes is charming and that the calluses on my hands don’t hurt others’ hands. That, maybe, I’m worthy. But she won’t allow me to live in that happy illusion. And she shouldn’t, of course, and I know that. But the mud still stings and the calluses still hurt and I still wake up every day with the stupid and childish hope that maybe this time, this time, her world could be mine and my world could be hers. But I know I’d squash her, just as the blue and the orange muddles into brown on the artist’s pallet. And she doesn’t deserve that. I could lock her away in a little airtight box to be mine, and mine only—mine to visit when the fear creeps up my neck again, mine to visit when the night light goes out, mine to visit when my calluses deface their palms, but that would be the ultimate sin: To sentence her to a suffocating death. But I don’t have the power to do that, even if I wanted to—just as the clover pushes through the sidewalk cracks, it’s stupid to believe for even a second that you could conquer her.
