The Voice
June 2024
Cover art: "Spiral of Light" by Aurora
Springtime
In the fields, there are dustings of flowers like confetti left over from a party, sprinkled over the land so randomly, yet beautiful in their chaos. Leaves slowly unfurl from their cocoons, caterpill...
What I Learned This Year In School
Even your favorite subject can be your hardest. Even the "smart ones" will fail. Even good grades become futile. Even a textbook won't teach you. Even your best isn't great. Even good dancers fa...
Papa Simmons; 5/3/2024
Hello sweetheart! My goodness, how time has flown. You used to be so little, do you remember? We would drive to watch the baseball games, leave two innings early to make it back home, And watch the fi...
I Wish I Was As Beautiful As The Ocean
On a rocky cliff where the grass sways in the wind and the sky never seems to end, there lies a silent house where a silent woman lives. She does not need to speak; the ocean does all the talking. E...
2:55 PM
The talking. The low hum of the trout tank. A few quiet people, me included. The sounds of people being scolded for their behavior at school. The cracking as I crack my fingers. The clickity-clacking ...
Love Is
Love is a gas station chain in the Midwest. Love is little girls with Mary Janes spreading kisses around the playground. Love is little boys who claim to hate them. Love is the front seat of your f...
Perfumed Lilacs and High-Fiving Trees
Today was the first time I've gone biking in the morning — the proper morning, when the sun is light on your shoulders and the neighborhood is waking up, bursting with birdsong and the not-so-harmonio...
Writing Dreams
If I could run away, I’d be gone. I’d clamber up the fence onto the roof and take off running. I’d bound up into the air and across the fields of puffy white clouds, bouncy and weightless. I’d fall th...
I Wanted To Love You
I wanted to love you, even though we never got the chance to explore what could have been. Every time we talked, I felt a spark, a hint of something more that perhaps existed only in my imagination. Y...
Change
My life is changing like the four seasons, though without any reason — I find myself scared of it. Change, it’s a horrifying but beautiful thing. Like in the early mornings of spring, the birds begin ...
Waning Moon, Fleeing Soul
The moon is waning, slipping away into the night, much like my mind. As I run over boulders and logs and grass and hills and trees and rivers and — snap back into reality, crashing from the forests of...
For A Friend I'll Never See Again
She’s lived here most of her life She never thought that would change. But now she's drowning in goodbyes, walking out the door, hoping it doesn’t lock her out. There’s s...
Wonder
Something I seem to always think back to, is what happens after you die. I used to get trapped in this thought and it was my biggest fear all throughout my childhood. You can't help but wonder what do...
To Be a Poet
To be a poet is not to write poems. No. Most anyone can do that. Most anyone has done that, for school, maybe. To be a poet is to see a tree and not just see a tree, to see the hungry branches reac...
Let Me Search
let me search spread across the earth like a wave of miraculous light let me search where movement makes undeniable sense where psychedelic circles vibrate like chimes let me search where my ange...
After
I can’t think about before or now, but after, after all the moaning and groaning, after all the cleaning, weeding, and mowing, after we cook, grill, and bake, after we cut, tape, and decorate, after t...
The Memoir Of A Locker
Hello, my friend. How have you been? It's nice to see your face — or ... your forehead skin. I don't understand what could be so vital that you never look up from that little black cellphone. I don...
This Kind of Summer
Your laughter reminds me of the shoreline as the tide goes in and out, as fireworks pulse overhead, your favorite beach towel with the toadstools sits still as you wade into the water. I sit on ...