Imagine the lunchroom,
crowded and wary—
seating charts a welcome apprehension.
Loose-leaf
papers spiraled from
ballpoint-scratched notebook covers
until the last hour,
when a teacher
sighed and sighed.
Today, we close our backpacks,
but minutes
come quick and quit
the ease of dawn.
Tina Boyer Brown is the managing director of the arts conservatories and creative writing department head at the Chicago High School for the Arts.
By Bertrand N. O. Walker
Hush thee and sleep, little one,
The feathers on thy board sway to and fro;
The shadows reach far downward in the water
The great old owl is waking, day will go.
Rest thee and fear not, little one,
Flitting fireflies come to light you on your way
To the fair land of dreams, while in the grasses
The happy cricket chirps his merry lay.
Tsa-du-meh watches always o’er her little one,
The great owl cannot harm you, slumber on
’Till the pale light comes shooting from the eastward,
And the twitter of the birds says night has gone.
By Suzanne S. Rancourt
I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we’d gather at this feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy's gluey clothing
and we’d smell like Mumma's Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that’s all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongue
the blood of tree?
By Roque Salas Rivera
We have lived on the horizon for so long,
coasts no longer know our flags.
They buried us where they bury ships,
Commonwealth projects, and literary whales,
which represent no threat.
Someday, a great writer will claim
we were an idea the breadth of an ocean
and,...
By Victoria Chang
Agnes only had nine years to live. The angels must have begun to hover around her canvas like monkeys. This canvas has nine white thin strips between the red and blue ones. I’ve spent my life thinking about the blue...
By Uma Menon
My first instinct is to translate
the word. Make it easier to understand
without saying the word itself.
I feel guilt for this mistake—
for changing languages instead
of describing. Isn’t this an easy way out?
My mother and I are playing charades
alone. We make this...
By Krystyna Dąbrowska
Prove that a person
is / is not
the smithy of his fate.
Topic of an assigned essay
I wrote for my brother.
He did math homework for me,
the smithy of my fate
in the hard sciences.
And I forged for him
a C in Polish class.
A difficult...
