On My Sixteenth Birthday

On my sixteenth birthday.

I curled into a ball in the frayed, silk afterglow of childhood,

Watching myself play with mom for the first time, eating raspberries in the garden, tumbling great towers of building blocks.

I watched myself stay up late with my friends for the first time,
When the big kids told us all to be quiet.

How quiet the rest of the night was then; how naive and jubilant we were

To believe that there was no world outside of our heads.

The waves didn’t crash on the edges of our island, and the sun would never rise.

The morning birds would have to wait.

wph

VT

17 years old

Poetry

By wph

Epistle by Donald Trump to the Angels

I first began in the business of selling people when I sold a strange man in Jerusalem that I did not like for thirty silver pieces. Swaths of people flocked after him down into the precipice of the market.

Read More
Poetry

By wph

Cameron Winter

1)
I think that when he looks at pianos,
The keys are stained and worn in
With grooves and dents,
In the shapes of his fingerprints,

Read More
Poetry

By wph

The Eldest Game

ghosts of peo / ple hiding in this house / they grew up in and left / hiding under tables in clo / sets long thin men pale pe / ople dark people all hidden / separately in the same room / waiting for the seeker to finis / h counting endlessly endl

Read More