It's Scary Growing Up

Acrylic by: Josephine Bank || Acrylic name: West End Ave

Written By: Wendy Chen

It’s scary growing up
Watching you lose pieces of yourself along the way
As your spunk and color slowly fades to match with beige school desks and muted uniform skirts
And maybe somewhere along the fading colors your laughter smudged out too

It’s alarming forgetting your mother tongue
As you outgrow the warmth of your mom’s lap
And you both stare into the mirror
Seeing sets of eyes that sag deeper into your face
Insatiable holes to remind you of the girlhood you lost
When you moved your dolls from mansions to lifeless attics

And now your grandpa looks so much older
Sagging into the armchair with the years upon him
You wonder if your toddler mischief added to his wrinkles
If in the past you’ve been too harsh

It’s hard forgetting your childhood home
And the food that didn’t taste like calories
The girl inside me hasn’t been whole for so long
I wonder if she’s forgotten the taste of Chinese food

And finally you realize you’re not a kid
As you blow out dripping wax candles
And drive yourself to places
Alongside people who’ve lost their colors too

and now you have to leave home, the last place you have left
And your mom will now eat dinner alone
You pack your childhood memories into paper boxes
Throwing away more of yourself into trash bags of toys and old books
And move into a dorm you’re forced to call home

The moment kicks now sitting in your room
with the walls stripped and the clothes taken out
Realizing coming home are only temporary visits
I realize I never wanted to grow up

Feather's Legacy

Acrylic by: Josephine Banks || Acrylic name: Beach Haven

Written By: Layna Girata

Feathers of a bird long passed float in the swirling green waters, drifting in delicate spirals like thoughts lost to time. The memory of the bird, dark and gray, is part of a vast chasm of forgotten memories and untold lives. This small, weightless fragment of nature represents an entire lifetime, yet is all that remains. 

Is it not curious, then, to examine the impact of our own lives? Even if they are cut short, our flame burns out before its expected time. Can we honestly say we have fulfilled our destiny on this Earth? Each breath we take is but a moment, passing on into the next, repeating in an endless cycle of forgotten memory, one overshadowed by the generations that have come before, and those that follow after. Will your story be told, or will you, like the dark feather, fade away into the waters of time?

Your legacy is simply a feather left behind after your death.

Your life is as fleeting as a bird passing by overhead, momentarily disrupting the sun’s rays.

No bird pressures itself to be perfect. No bird expects more of itself than it can give. No bird wastes its life on trivial, meaningless things.

How are we, as humans, any more important than this bird, whose only impact is a single feather? Perhaps we are not. And in that realization, there is freedom – the freedom to soar without fear, to die without regret. Like the bird, we only need to live, accepting our place in a much larger story, stretching before and beyond us.

Closure

Photograph taken by: Fin Boots || Photograph name: Föst

Written by: Xander Monteiro

For it is

an end

to end with

a say.

A very little combination

of sy-lla-bles

forming simplistic words

and phrases that leave

a tethered heart

hinged.

A fire for a frayed rope,

a burn necessary

for it to stay

together,

Instead of each strand disappearing with the smoke.

How such an action that

is driven from nothing, but,

the worst news imaginable

can heal so much!

How a little stitch can prevent

numerous stitches from being needed.

At many times this

carrier of

information

is heaven for

someone bound

to drift into

hell!

Such a little

thought can

drive a near senseless

action

into a supportive

air bag.

For it is this

little thing

that can keep

a soul roped in place.

For it is

a minute consideration

that

prevents long endured

consternation.

that severely

saves so many

happy souls

drenched in deep sorrow and deprivation.

It's keeping their eyes wide

enough, to see the

light of present day.

Barefoot

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.

Summation

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.

White Fawn

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.