star

The girls drum their fingernails

Lightly

Not like real drumming

More like timid rain.

Their nails extend

Two nail lengths past

     My name is Lucy Danto. I am in the eighth grade at the McCullough Junior High School in Texas. Please, if even for a brief moment, let my voice be heard. 

as my skin weathers from the winter frost,

i close my eyes and embrace my loss.

my eyelids cast a darkness over the retina,

but the blackness becomes subsided by a light.

My copy of Frankenstein sits on my lap, the old pages glad to finally be read. I began it at the end of eighth grade, and yet I am only a few chapters in now.

That house, worn down by sun and salt rain, was doomed. In a few years,

it would be a hollow replacement, gone from our stale grown-up brains. 

Footprints of tourists painting the sand,

The cries of the ocean berating the land.

Chappell Roan and milestones,

Informing the world we aren’t fighting alone.

Ten teenagers talking til the old year gives way,