By Nicole Miravite
“In my own experience, burnout has felt like the fire of motivation actively dying in me, and my mind will want to get things done, while my body can’t handle much more than sitting around and watching the time pass. It hurts because I know what I have to do but if I can’t make myself do it, then what’s the point?”
By Lauren Waer
“Write about someone you love or tell me one of your personal love stories …tell me anything you know about love,” spoke my young professor as she turned to look at each of us.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
It started on a breezy winter day in the middle of January when I walked into class and was greeted with a brand new face. Everyone seemed to know him: they were all joking around and laughing as if he had been there the entire time and didn’t just randomly pop up.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
The rest of January, February, March, and April flew by, our only interactions small conversations about completely random things. We were close acquaintances at most.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
In May, things changed. I declared us friends, which sounds a little silly but that’s practically exactly what happened. We texted often and within days I had told him all of my funny stories and I was elated, even though the thought that he was leaving soon and I shouldn’t get so attached was burning into through to the front of my brain.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
I did get attached though, just like I knew I would. I remember the night that he told me where he was going to college, a whole 2000 miles away. I held my phone to my chest, happy for him but also so, so, so devastated and that’s when I knew that our separation was going to be so much harder for me than I originally anticipated.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
When I watched him walk across the stage in that silky graduation gown only a few weeks after we became friends, I was happy for him. And I continued to be happy for him even when he started taking longer to text back, when his replies were shorter and seemingly less interested, when I realized that I loved him in a way that didn’t seem like the standard definition of love but was instead my own kind of love that he simply didn’t reciprocate.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
I broke off our communication in August after I realized that he didn’t care about me as much as I cared about him. I tried to blot out our memories, blot out all of the songs and little things that reminded me of him so I wouldn’t be reminded of the person that I ached to talk to.
I don’t think I can quite call this love.
I think I’m doing better, that maybe the blotting worked.
I don’t think of him as often.
By Isabella Carrión
How long will it take for roots
To begin to sprout from
The bottoms of my feet?
How do I make sure that never happens to me?
The sky above my home is all too familiar. The clouds always pass by in the same way
The purples and pinks sting my eyes now. They’d hurt your eyes too if you
had nothing else to look at. Why can’t it be a little bit more pale? A little bit more soft?
Why can’t it be new?
I feel like I need new staircase railings in hand
And new roads under my feet. This all seems too planned
Something I could never understand
Was why I stayed. My roots are far too tangled.
But this old town feels new with you
We walk the streets like they’re ours.
They are ours. We paved them ourselves
These nights play through my mind on reels of never ending film
For weeks. Your smile shining brighter than the moon
We are tall with our hands in the air side by side in the infinite night
I play a soundtrack in my mind
Trust me, it would be one hell of a scene
I can see the short film now. The roots start growing from the bottoms of our feet,
The ones I was so afraid of before, bursting through the soles of our sneakers
They intertwine, there are no words
Only music
And as the sun pushes and rises up into the night
Rose pink pressing against dark purple
We watched from our place on the earth
Side by side
Cool air mingled with warm souls
The sunrise looked gorgeous again.
By Luis Esquer
“This art was made to demonstrate the beauty that I saw growing up. I may live in a desert but that does not mean there is an absence of vivid colors. Tucson’s cacti are greener than any forest with flowers more colorful than any rainbow and a sunset like no other.”
by Grace Waldrip
Sometimes I feel like I can fly
The wind rushes and transports me
And for a moment I forget
I am a bird, delicate, and light
Not weighed down by grief or pain
Other times I’m trapped in a dark cloud
I’m barely making myself move
Even though I know I can
The smog encapsulates me
Slowly I suffocate underneath it all
I’m told it’s normal
All teenagers feel this
But I know it isn’t
I know it’s more
No one listens
Not to me anyway
Not to us
By Reia Li
In my mind,
the smell of rain
and the smell of creosote
intertwine.
I still don’t know if rain
smells like creosote,
or if creosote smells like rain.
Sitting on the smooth wooden bench in my grandparent’s porch
in Tennessee,
the moment after the storm,
the air doesn’t smell like creosote.
It smells like
wet, dark dirt
and crackling leaves
and delicate, flowering mold.
“I’m obsessed with lines. In art, it fascinates me how I can create a full image, or the suggestion of an image through beautiful overlapping lines. In poetry I strive to illuminate a moment with a few blossoming words.”
By Rafael Grenier
There is no creator without the destroyer
I like to picture the destroyer as an editor
One that edits out imbalances
Slowly picks through the works, cutting excess
The creator crafts tragedies and miracles
The editor rounds them out
Grief and Joy decay and are born simultaneously
Still, I exhaust myself playing whack-a-mole
Hopefully, that’ll get edited out
Keep in mind, the creator has no volition
Nor does the destroyer, but that’s easier to swallow
We live at the whim of cosmic indifference
Within an infinite plane, all points are the center
So why not let it be us?
You are all that you have ever known and ever will know
Make a narrative out of your ragdoll self
I hope to yield to grasping tight, to find solace in the formulas
(Variables I could never hope to understand)
Creator is truth
Editor is normalcy
Whatever makes you happy, I guess.
by Ana Mendoza
I am strong
I keep to myself and I don’t share my problems and when you start to yell, I don’t cry
when you criticize, I don’t mind
I’ve been cracking for a while
and slowly but surely i’m falling to pieces
that one day won’t form who you know
I am weak
I cry to myself and postpone all my problems When I speak, you don’t seem to care
My feelings mean less, since i’m young
I still hope you’ll come around
And change all the words and the harshest opinions That’ve cracked me since day number one
By Leandra Gee
Listen.
No, really, just listen.
Listen to the palm fronds shaking in the heated breeze, and to the bats chirping overhead, eating the mosquitoes that are flitting and buzzing towards you.
Listen to the faint and muffled noise of someone playing pop rock music from their bedroom while you watch the sunset turn from bright orange and yellow, to peach, to pink, to gone.
And listen to the sound of a thousand hearts beating in your neighborhood, every one of them holding a different rhythm.
Listen to the silent pool ripples caused by the same warm breaths that create the rainy clatter of the palm tree which flutters to the left in your peripheral.
You lie down where you have been sitting on the artificial grass near the bench swing and you listen to the nonexistent noise of your emotionless mind.
Listening to the ghosts of thoughts which used to frequent that space of creativity, now only gray
like the sky above; devoid of the brightness of the desert sunset.
Just listen.
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