Poetry

Dinner is silent again,

My dad was fired,

And my mom’s tired from working late again,

And I’m trying not to be sick from it all.
 

My sister’s talking about poverty

And how educators get the scraps,

2025-2026 challenge submission!

Favorite foods! What is it, and/or: how do you make it, where did you first taste it (if you can remember lol), and who/what/where does it remind you of?

could you just pretend for a second,

a minute, a moment, an ounce

of time that you feel the same as i do,

instead of running out the room

like Cerberus was on your heels

and i was death, herself.

I guess I've been thinking

The story mountain we made

And the characters didn't even get their lives told

Because ours crashed and burned before we could handle it

Can somebody

Anybody

Tell me if I’m doing this

Right

Tell me if I’m following the right set

Of instructions

Tell me if I’m using the 

Correct map

Can somebody

Anybody

Nope

I'm not going back to school.

I'm going to ignore the back-to-school ads

And shopping trips

The packing

The new outfits

The brand-new pencils

I won't do it

we sat and imagined fireflies

flitting between the tops of the RVs

as the sun disappeared into muggy,

illicit sludge. we realized we both liked

 the sticky-sweet taste of summer

summer's like  /  skips on a record player, pink and beat up by two moving vans and two generations of children who danced to the Bee Gees on  /  rugs that aren't there anymore  /  i have successfully wasted three mon

you remind me of 𝕔𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕪 decay. in a pop-up cartoon store, flies buzzing around your flushed eyeballs.

𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒙𝑨𝑮𝑮𝒆𝒓𝑨𝒕𝒆𝒅 and with hearts still in your eyes. tell me whether it hurt when they loved you.

You 

love me 

fast, miss me 

faster, I ran to 

you, now running away takes 

much longer. To get to you  

Family wears many faces— 

For some, it’s warmth and comfort, 

For others, it’s silence or storm. 

Often, we search for it in strangers, 

Bound not by blood, 

But by soul.