Publication of this issue of Here was funded by a Faculty Development Grant and a JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Grant from Eastern Connecticut State University.
Submissions for the next issue of Here are welcome October 1 to November 30, 2024, through our Submittable link: https://herepoetryjournal.submittable.com/submit
Editor's Note
We are very happy to present to you the 6th issue of Here: a poetry journal!
Our principal goal as an editing team is to create, through poetry, an evergrowing, inclusive and supportive community that brings people together to share their stories, be heard, and learn from each other across cultures, countries, and generations. Each issue of Here is in conversation with the issues that came before it and presents a challenge as well as an opportunity to the issues that follow it to continue to expand that community.
You’ll see on these pages new work by longtime friends of Here as well as new friends at various stages of their writing careers. One group that we haven't featured in previous issues is high school students. We are happy to share with you, then, the three top winners of our 2023 High School Creative Writing Contest, which was held in conjunction with Eastern’s second Literary Festival for High School Students. On October 13, 2023, Eastern welcomed more than 200 young writers to campus for an inspiring lecture by keynote speaker and contest judge Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, generative writing workshops with published authors and distinguished Eastern alumni, and a wonderfully supportive open mic session that would have run for another hour if the buses hadn’t arrived to take students back to their schools.
I would like to thank this year’s team of student and associate editors, who screened the work submitted to us and offered thoughtful insights regarding which poems should be published and why. I also want to thank Eastern student Bellana Parungao, who contributed this year’s cover art as well as a terrific poem. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. William Salka, Eastern’s Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Eastern’s JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Committee for financial support that made publishing this issue possible as well as Dr. Emily Todd, Eastern’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, and my English Department colleagues for their continued support of Here
Happy reading!
Daniel Donaghy, Editor
Julia Morris Paul
Praise Poem
Praise for the journal, its opening entry that says, I am friends with wet boots and dirty socks. Praise for the artifact of his handwriting. The beauty of his graffiti scrawl on its cover. Praise for the journal for giving voice after the silence. Praise for this journal that tells me he believed in angels. That he saw one, wings spread wide, at the end of a long dark street. Praise for angels and praise for solace and praise for the woman with sad eyes who gave him three dollars. Praise for his dreams and the stars that lit them like tiny votives. For the dream about his friend dragging a couch across broken asphalt onto the double yellow lines, where he sat waiting for his mother to come through the smog of exhaust. Praise for his friend who shared the couch in the woods. Praise for woods and bridges and all-night laundromats where clean socks are left in a basket by the door. Praise for clean socks and unlocked doors. Praise for this journal that unlocks secrets. For sloppy handwriting and sloppy truths. Praise for details and literary tricks. For saying I won’t go into details and then going into details about licking blood from his arm and doing pushups on bathroom floors just to get the vein.
Praise for the courage to write.
Praise for the pen and the spiral notebook. For its seventy-four blank pages, each one an agony of silence.
Praise for all that is unsaid, how it echoes.
Praise the unsteady hand, the clenched fist.
Praise the pale blue lines that stretch across these pages like a tightrope.
Cait O’Kane
Tanka For Kensington
nothing new around broken syringes under streetlight
corner store halos dopers nodding next to signs: EBT IS DOWN engines & sirens empty boxes w/o light purposefully made red brick to grey paint LUXURY HOMES DO NOT ENTER
sudden onset Expansion: Tyvex & Vinyl zero onsite to steal
twelve-hour workday nothing left inside of me just bills & rent & debt
excavators cough exhaust bulldozers belch Development stackempacks & pharmacies
a girl sags against splintered shutters advertising bygone DEALS
billboards warn of partial response to medicines ask your doctor say a novena carry a cross a prayer is a deal too late the siren the gun long fired the station long closed
red spatter dots the sidewalk a Section means something cornered, stuck, & cut
horizons of want souls sinking someplace beyond love where skylines don’t reach
Polaroids from Master Street for my Grandad
I never met the man who, in every photo, shielded his bloodshot eyes from the oncoming flash, his mouth a tight corner. I never hugged the man who, at age six, cut his own dad’s body down from the cellar ceiling
during Saturday morning chores. I never kissed the man who shoved four Tastykakes & a buck knife down his pants minutes before the cops hauled him away for robbery while his wife sobbed & prayed to Jesus to deliver him from his whiskey & his brothers. All I have left of him are blurred Polaroids of crucifixes & cans of Schlitz, faded Easter grass & candy wrappers, and of course, all his blue shirts, always buttoned to the collar, always tucked in.
Something For the Pain
Curled up on plastic chairs, freezing & crying w/ my hood up in the ER’s waiting area, I barely saw the guy slump down next to me. I didn’t see him tie off underneath his Eagles hoodie, I didn’t see the spike go in. I did see his narrow shoulders shake, I did hear him sigh, but I just thought that he must’ve been feeling sick the same as me, COVID-positive, breathless, nerves on fire, heart rate 160, fever-chilled, heat on the fritz making it impossible to sweat the virus out. Exhausted after shuffling through gray snow & stamp bags, after stepping over body after body on the Ave toward Episcopal for help, I hardly noticed his head lower as if in deep contemplation or in desperate prayer—I thought (I swear) that he was weeping, too, counting, like me, the newly dead he knew, afraid to name ourselves among them.
Then I saw his blue mask drop to the floor, saw his blue lips mouth a final ragged fuck before he fell over & out right next to me. I willed my legs to stand, my feet to move & I staggered to the nurse’s station coughing
A GUY COLLAPSED PLEASE WE NEED HELP. Sets of scrubs came running w /naloxone & oxygen. They wheeled the guy away behind a closed-off corridor, & I saw my own self slumped over how many times, begging my breath to come, my heart to beat, my eyes to open, begging the world to give me one more chance & I would stop for good, swearing to God I meant it.
A nurse brought me back to a bed, swabbed my nostrils, took my vitals, hooked me up to oxygen & instructed me to rate my pain. I tried, through sobs & wheezes, to describe EBT, LIHEAP, SNAP, Medicaid, clocking in for a double the day I first fell ill, sweeping & mopping condos, panting w /every step, coming home to one space heater. It all poured out of me like blood, a gush of garbled syllables to the weary eyes & covered faces of those who’ve heard it all before, & worse.
The doctor came in, saying they’d monitor my vitals & give me IV fluids & something for the pain. I closed my eyes, waiting for hydromorphone’s sweet burn to run through me like a bolt of lightning or a lover’s fingers.
By the way, the doctor said, your boyfriend made it, he’ll be OK. I told him I didn’t know the guy who OD’d, I’d never met him—he’d just been sitting next to me. The doctor explained he’d never checked in or gave his name, had no ID & no insurance. The guy’d just come in crying from the cold to shoot his last shot someplace warm. We see it all the time, he said. I coughed again, & my nurse returned, carrying a syringe.
Lilia Burdo
Writing Wrongs
As a middle schooler, I purposefully stranded myself out at sea. I pretended I didn’t see the pulling of eyelids or hear the mocking accent or witness the pointing and yelling “Chinese!” in the hallways. I kept quiet in the corner to write down my feelings, though when I read what I had written, I knew it wasn’t right.
I choked as tears formed a knot in my throat, threatening me to not tell anyone what was happening. Yet words managed to escape my lips at home. A salty tsunami washed down my face while my mom called the school. I can imagine the guidance counselor failing to properly write down what happened, while I failed to say who hurt me. At that age, tattling just isn’t right.
Perhaps the school didn’t stop the racism because they know my family is white. Since I wasn’t raised the “Asian way,” they didn’t see me as Asian, and therefore they assumed I wasn’t affected by the demeaning comments. Or maybe they knew it was wrong to sit back, but the administration was afraid, my principal was a coward, while I had to follow the very principle of letting others step all over me. I cowered during classes, but not without a silent fight. Though it may have taken me ten years, I now sit here to write about how I looked a classmate right in the eye as they pulled the corner of theirs and used a Chinese accent that I never had. Although I have almond eyes, I grew up in the U.S. and learned how to dot my “i”s. It’s sometimes difficult for others to accept that I will never have an accent except if I were to learn a language other than English. Though I may learn how to write Chinese characters, the way I pronounce them may be far from right.
To go even further, some of my peers would allude to the idea that I had to elude danger in China and that I should be ever-so-grateful that I had been rescued. Others wondered if I frequently thought about my biological family. No. I don’t wake in the morning and stare at my reflection, mourning biological parents I can’t picture. And for those who think I should spend my time to find birth parents who would be forced to spend their money, be fined, for abandoning their daughter––perhaps in need of a son––I have a fire burning inside me as strong as the sun that tells me there is more to my life than trying to open doors that are nailed closed. My language, my upbringing, and the clothes that I wear do not correlate to where I was born. I experienced racism for a culture I have very little knowledge of and was made to hate who I was.
There has been a hole in my heart since those middle school days when I suppressed my identity. Just now, I realize I’m ready to be whole again. So I, the yellow daughter surrounded by white, have learned to write down wrongs that no person should believe are right. Using a pencil, I tell my story and write the truth and no one can tell me which parts are wrong and which parts are right.
Conversations Over Ice Cream
If I was told that today I’d meet the mother who birthed and abandoned me, the father who tucked me in a blanket and set my newborn body on the ground without looking back, I’d wear my bronze dress from Express. I’d throw on my tan wedges, sling an expensive-looking purse over my shoulder, dust makeup over my eyelids and cheeks, and extend my Mandarin Duolingo streak before running out the door.
I’d sit tall on the ride over, peer out the window, say “horses” to myself when I pass pastures. I’d stop for a frozen hazelnut coffee from Dunkin and sing along to Lizzy McAlpine blasting in my car. Once I’d get to our meeting point, an ice-cream shop, since they’d have a feeling that I’m an ice-cream lover, I’d walk inside the building with fields and cows painted on the walls, sticky wooden tables, and sprinkles smushed into the plank board floors, and I’d see a woman smiling with plump rosebud lips and ridges on her teeth, and a man standing behind her with a head of full hair and a freckle or two planted on his cheek.
“A small cup of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream with hot fudge and whipped cream, please. No, no cherry, but thank you,” I’d order. “You don’t like cherries, either? Like mother, like daughter,” the woman would say to me with a wink. After the man wipes off loose sprinkles from the tabletop, we’d sit down, and I’d tell them that I like to write poetry, play tennis with my sister, bake cookies from scratch, that I used to play softball, but stopped when the coaches told me I had to be mean to my opponents, that I grew up in community theater and singing in my high school’s best choirs, how I graduated early from community college and was a valedictorian, that I had the opportunity to live in Florence, Italy, for six weeks, that my favorite meal of the day is breakfast and that I love when the sky turns pink and when flowers grow on trees and when I play with my dog and that the family that adopted me has given me the world. They’d smile at all of this, tell me about themselves. Then they’d open their arms for an embrace, and though I’m not much of a hugger, I’d let them hold me for as long as they wanted before asking them why they let me go.
José B. González
A Skillet Poem
he shoved my pages away and told me not to submit another grandmother poem, or another mother poem. no more poems about the women who sculpted my poems, they, who turned sweat into milk, would no longer have open doors to my poems. so instead I wrote a skillet poem that wasn’t a mother poem or a grandmother poem. no, this was a skillet poem and not an about-my-mother or grandmother poem. this was not a poem about my grandmother teaching my mother to pattycake tortillas, how to shape the masa and mold pupusas type of poem. no this poem was about a skillet burning on its sides, a stubborn skillet, a flaming skillet, a charring skillet, a skillet that could make magic out of plantains. no, this was a skillet poem. a poem about a skillet with the iron weight of a bronze statue, a skillet so heavy it needed two arms to be lifted from flames, a skillet so heavy that the day my mother found my grandmother lying on the couch burying her bruises inside her hands, a skillet so heavy that my mother lifted it like a weight over her head, a skillet so heavy that my mother grunted as she ran to the bedroom, a skillet so heavy that she dropped it only to lift it on her stepfather’s face until her arms burned, until the insides of his eyes looked burned. a skillet that yelled, don’t ever put your hands on that woman. a skillet so heavy, so so heavy, that, yes, it deserves its own poem.
Bellana Parungao
To: Dysphoria
That night in the shower was the worst it has ever been. My tears mixed with water, joining in brackish rivers down my hardened face, blocking breath and blurring vision, knees curled up to my chest, trying to return to when I was unborn and undeveloped, staring vacantly up through the ceiling where the God they say will save me should be. All that I was, and all that I could become without you, crumpled beneath the hydraulic press of the personal hell you made for me. Against the cold, ribbed plastic of the tub, my breasts hung off my body; disgusting, cancerous growths you planted to rape the euphoria I would have had without you. There, vile, fatty seed flourished where smooth muscle should have shone like armor. I claim no ownership of you; you who rob me every day of masculine figure and androgynous power. Instead of the parasitic relationship you dreamed of, I only claim ownership of the pain you have caused me, and all I have endured in spite of you:
Every slur, Every loneliness, Every cis-privilege ignorance, Every absent-minded misgendering, Every law that makes my existence illegal, Every Ron Desantis, Donald Trump, Matt Walsh, Every denial that I am gender unlabeled, that I am me, Every “Don’t get top surgery, you’re going to regret it!” Every unspoken “Trans autonomy is a dangerous privilege!” Every “You need a letter from a medical professional because I don’t believe you!” Every cis man with gynecomastia getting the procedure that would stop you from killing me, Every knife I deny the suicidal pleasure of cutting off my breasts in mutually assured destruction, Every socially-acceptable cornering and interrogation by an entitled, “curious ally,” Every day that I rise and stare at you until I am engulfed by reality hurts me more than you will ever know.
But everything that I survive is a time you have failed to win, and living to spite your loathsome curse and grin in your face is far sweeter than the death some would wish upon me simply because I am Bellana.
Benjamin Goluboff
A Square in the 48th Ward
This is a square on the Chicago grid defined by Thorndale to the north, Bryn Mawr south, Clark to the west, and Broadway east. It’s where Uptown meets Edgewater and the grid goes wonky and bendy. Ashland becomes a four-lane here, branching off from Clark, a steep diagonal running northwest-southeast, parallel to Ridge, a shallow diagonal that branches off at the feeder for Dusable southbound. Ridge begins where Peterson, coming in from the west becomes Elmdale, and Ridge ends in a three-way with Bryn Mawr and Broadway at the Flat Iron Building that houses one of the Schools of Rock across Broadway from Taqueria Uptown. The two diagonals, Clark and Ridge, one steep one shallow, put the grid out of step with itself and make this a neighborhood of oddball streets: shadow diagonals, one-ways and interrupties, doglegs and fifties (sometimes called sixteenthers). Wayne. Early. Victoria. The short-lived Edgewater Ave. There’s good Mexican and Ethiopian here, some cool little theaters, but what you mainly come for are the streets.
Wild Chicago
Where the Orange Line bends east-west between the Halsted and Roosevelt stops to parallel 18th St. across from the Cop Shop, a Cooper’s hawk, a big female, takes off from the tracks, flies over rows of parked cop cars, disappears from view.
In the tiny fenced yard behind the Old Town School, on the nameless street that branches off Oakley behind Lincoln, a population of woodland phlox, a dense unmixed stand, blooms pinky-blue every May.
Right here on Paulina an old silver maple has heaved up the sidewalk and built in the space between pavement and curb a topography of impacted roots: knobs and swales, kettles and slopes where grass and moss and wood sorrel grow and where privatized honeybees try to make a living.
Linda M. Crate
never felt like home here in this apartment and in this town, i feel utterly alone; that's why i like to travel, even if it's just a short trip to visit my mother i like every little adventure— keeps my mind off of the disappointment of feeling trapped in a town i don't want to be in, wish i could move back in with my parents sometimes; this place has never felt like home.
Richard Jordan
October: One Last Blackbird
We went to the marsh to remind ourselves of spring & there it was, a single
red-winged blackbird flitting in & out of cattails. You called to him, a brisk check check
oak-a-lee, as I focused my long lens on the deep scarlet epaulet, that flawless golden band.
I suppose we didn’t know we'd kiss right there, but then the clouds had thinned, the hills came into view & before the bird flew off— well, what else could we do?
Paul Martin
Love in the Pandemic
Waking beside you, I see the world outside the window, gray and dangerous. Let’s linger in the warmth we make together. Later we’ll put on masks and gloves to shop for milk, bread, a few groceries we’ll make into meals that will last a week or two. But now let’s listen to the singing of birds we haven’t heard since last summer. The wind that’s raged all night has shaped a cozy house for us. Let your breath caress my ear. If your mouth comes close, I won’t say no.
Stories
Cruising again through the old towns, my brother slows past the abandoned ice plant where, he says, he and another brother worked the midnight shift, just kids, replacing the men who’d gone off to war in the '40s. While the rest of the town slept, they filled metal containers with water and froze them into large blocks as they listened on the radio to Dawn Patrol, still another thing I didn’t know about him, ten years older than me. Then I tell him about a priest interrupting my class and putting me on an all-night train ride to see our dying father, the car cold, the bleak small towns in the window. Old men now, we tell each other stories that fill in the blank years between us, each story a small gift slowly opened as we wind down back roads in no rush to get wherever we’re going.
The High Wire
Between the rusted mill and the dirt alley where a car is up on blocks, a bare-chested boy steps onto the railroad tracks. Arms out to each side, he tests the slippery silver rail and falls off, restarting again and again, determined to tightrope into the distance, moving deliberately as he does, as though at a dangerous height where one wrong step would see him hurtling down toward the gray houses, the vacant stores, the crippled, uncertain future.
Natalie Schriefer
Almost Hiking the Albany Pine Bush Preserve
They burn down sections yearly, another almost-hiker tells me
in the parking lot. It’s destruction in the name of preservation: this park
is one of twenty inland pine barrens. Without the burns, it would thicken to forest. The thing that makes it special would disappear. I’m familiar with change and its violence. Every day is a pick-your-own adventure, and smoky
New Karner Road is a sign. The trailhead too, blocked by A-frame barriers:
Sometimes you have to burn who you are to return to who you want to be.
Steve Myers
That Day
What mattered that day had already happened, west of Snow Shoe by Black Moshannon, where sumac, hickory, red and white pine close in on Route 80, the “Pennsylvania Wilds.”
An overnight ice storm had coated the boughs and sheathed the leafless branches. Even with the heater cranked, even with the sound-damping, frozen fog, you could hear the crack and snap as some gave with the weight, then
a lone crow exploding from the roadside in a sun-shot scatterburst, orange, yellow, hot-pink light refracting from limbs still ice-encased, igniting the snowpack, the ten-thousand shards of glassine crystal, fallen and shattered, shooting vectors in myriad directions, slant and skewed, charging the corridor we tunneled through—the air diamonded—for how much time?—
before the gray returned, the color draining from sky, trees, the grimy berm.
Sarah Mayo
Taith
Morning mist, sunshine glimpsed. Another justanotherday with a slight train delay. The station guard gases with her litter-picking pal; my hot-wired mind leaps elsewhere, tastes cherries on the air, flicks between fantasy and the slight gasp and grasp of
Mind the step onto the near empty carriage, ticket clasped on the paw. Piping, pumping, pulsing thoughts switch background noise off, blurs surroundings. Until the flittering is paused by a painter’s scene of tall pines semi-shrouded in this evocative mist, towering over uneven rows of terraces––waiting to vibrate again on canvas with the reimagined splash & dash of an artist’s vibrancy.
And I almost hear these old miners’ homes rumble with their stores of voices, many generations over; coated in coal dust, waiting for the women to pour hot water in tin baths. Mothers bending and aching over their mangles, singing, or nattering as they do so.
I nearly catch the wear and tear clump and thump of worn-out shoes walking to school or the pit; sense the taste buds tingling at the promise of bread and dripping with perhaps a slap of bacon––memory’s smell lingering through the valley, so even I can taste it, as this chugging engine pulls me towards the end of the line, to a smatter of rain and the expectancy of the office.
Rob Cording
Grasshoppers
After my grandfather died, my grandmother continued to talk with him. Before bed, she’d tell him which flowers bloomed in their garden, what the sermon had been about and who had gone north for the summer.
That June, after she’d settled into her trailer in upstate New York, the family worried about her being alone. She’d need help getting to her doctors’ appointments, and I’d been assigned a week of shuttling her.
In the car, she’d babble on and on, relaying Maureen’s report from Florida or Joyce’s update on Bill’s dementia, but I never listened. One afternoon, headed back to the cardiologist, she noticed a grasshopper clinging
to the corner of the windshield and cried out, Look at those grasshoppers! I laughed, tried to tell her there was only one, but she insisted there were two, had already decided they must be in love.
Prayer Card
I carried my brother’s face in my pocket until creases spread across his forehead and his dimples wrinkled over, as though he weren’t only 31 when he died.
That first year, I needed him at my side where I could touch the peeling corners of his smile and hold him as if in prayer for another chance to be close.
Self Portrait
This body charged with skin of high-noon, of sweet roasted sands blown into sea dunes,
with ears wading cool in rippling harmonics, and almond-shaped eyes with pupils of onyx.
This voice all brined in ocean-soft timbre, of mellow marimba under sunglow-amber,
with leather smooth palms cut glossy from diamond, and deft fingers chiseled by sharp-winded islands.
This head so dressed in rainbow-kissed curls, of billowing waves and honey-silk pearls.
This body with lips of sap, of falling moon, of budding bloom, of dawn come soon.
This sand dollar heart washed up on the shore, a cadenza that swells and ebbs at my core.
Aliyah Cotton
Elegy for Dom with the Echo of a Marching Band Inside It
There is this morning-tired place where I imagine him now: a red brick porch under a yellow house whose walls don’t want to be walls anymore and would desert the porch if it weren’t for the boy with his drum pad & sticks they keep dry from the rain.
The bricks blend in with his hands when he’s been at it too long. The bricks are a kind of rain and the rain eats itself
the way a crumbling structure moans its work song into dust & debris. On these kinds of mornings
when the hangover of night speaks only in the theory of things––the nothing of things––
I let myself wander as if to find him again, still tapping that étude and gazing off into some distant soundscape, not at Nau Gibson Hall and the sundial plaza that overlooks Jefferson Park Avenue, and not on the corner where, later, he might find a bit of heaven in a six-pack of Coors Light or on the back of a kicked-over chair. A swinging rope.
What do you do when nothing calls you anymore. When even the noisy boy upstairs has stopped his drumming.
When the shadow nesting in your chest sleepwalks away without your knowing. Leaves the hatch unlocked & open to the wind & strangers & the only untouched part of you has chosen to ride the boom of the practicing band all the way to the top.
I’m going to listen to that sky in this room where I’m doubled over and I’m going to make it talk to me. I’m going to talk it back down to me & make him imagine himself the way I do: as the music of his hush with the heavens burning behind him.
Eastern Connecticut State University's 2023 Literary Festival for High School Students
Creative Writing Contest Winners (Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, final judge)
First Prize
Elizabeth Johnson
People are like cars in my rearview mirror
The old blue pickup truck riding my ass all the way to the light / Blocking out the need to watch out for other cars / cars respect a truck with a place to be / Until I turn left and they turn right.
Like the kid constantly there / Nagging / Teasing / Talking / So much talking / Making everyone laugh / Always being there / Right behind me / When needed / (Or not) / Until we need to separate / Our paths dissect from one another / And I may never see that old truck again / And after being stuck in front of them for so long / It feels weird not to have a big blue truck behind me / Feels empty / Maybe even lonely.
The sterling white Subaru driving behind me, then next to me, then crossing in front of me / Causing me to hit the brakes quick / And as she drives further away I notice the busted taillight / And the the duct tape holding the bumper together
Like the girl who I made my world / Standing behind her and her every bad decision she made / Until I couldn’t / And spun out of control / And after pulling it back together and gaining control of the vehicle / I notice how damaging and painful it was to drive based on others recklessness / And how happy I am to be alone on this new, narrow, winding road.
The tiny jet black Mazda who works to keep a fair distance between cars / No stickers or color seen / Not that it doesn’t exist / But not visible to those outside of the car / As to not show any weakness to those who may judge / Or ridicule
Like the boy I barely knew / Yet I could spew tidbits of information about who he was / Deep down / The real stuff / The pieces of a human I was
barely allowed to know / Consider myself lucky / Most people don’t even see them driving by
The lime green four-door Ford truck / With a muffler as loud as thunder / And big bold tires with colorful rims / And bumper stickers showing all the places it’s been / Cape Cod / Florida / New Hampshire / New Jersey / The goal? / “Funky lookin” / Doesn’t blend in with the cars on the freeway / Can be seen from far away / Can’t miss it / Won’t forget it.
Like the girl / whose been here / for all of it / Adventerous / Funny / Loud / Kind / Sweet / With a laugh as loud as the exhaust pipe / And eyes as bright as the paint on the truck’s doors / You would think they might be mean / Regina George / The truck intimidating / And yet / The lime green front bumper gives you space to move lanes / And you can see the driver / With a welcoming smile / Who let you into her inner circle as soon as she saw you / Makes you feel like you might be one of her favorite people / How lucky.
The Steel Gray Jeep Wrangler / top down / doors off / letting the wind blow through car / and the colorful tassel dangling off the mirror / and the bumper stickers showing each of every coastal town from Maine to Florida / on the back tire, a image of surfboards / definition of a beach bum
Like the girl / I’ve grown to love / who sings Rihanna down the halls / and dances like no one else notices / lives in water / the ocean / the pool / the lake / can always make you smile / laugh / when math class just seems too overwhelming / with a wicked gleam in her eye / always cracking a joke / in a constant state of motion / with the wind blown through her hair / Lives in sunshine / goes through life like one of its rays
These cars have come and gone/ I have changed along the way / trusted / protected / defended / Although I may never see these cars and they may never see me / at one point in time / they were there / behind me / in my rearview mirror.
Millyhon Stoney
Second Prize
Seaway Songstress
I hear her song like a call. An entrancing melody smoother than rippling water, clear against the splashing tide echoing throughout the harbor. Swirling sea foam surrounds her shape while her words beckon me through the mist.
The crashing waves come to a calm. Her song paints a picture of beauty as her slender frame enters into view, daintily perched upon her jagged rock. The haze has vanished, and warm rays reflect off the vast crystal ocean.
Her pale, milky skin soaks in the sun, glowing with radiance and youth. Honey-colored hair flows like silk over her delicate freckled form. I’m confined within her gaze, drawn closer to my muse with every soothing note she sings.
The water steadily rises above my shivering bod, yet I pay it no mind, inching closer towards the ethereal figure––so close, yet so far from her grace. I will soon join her in song, singing a new tune of my own; a desperate lament as she ceases to croon, her slender hands dragging me under.
Kimberly Yankson
Third Prize
When My Black Hair Wasn’t Black Hair
I
When I was a child, I didn’t understand that I was any different from anyone else I would meet. I could count the amount of people that looked like me on my fingers in school—I could probably name them all, too. When you are younger, you don’t see the differences until an adult teaches you these things. That’s why, for the longest time, I didn’t know what my natural hair was like. From the age of 4, I was forced to put a chemical in my hair that stripped me of my coils. I would tell people my hair was naturally straight, because no one told me the product I let my mom apply to my hair was burning the curl out of my hair. It sure did feel like it, though. I would always complain about wanting to wash it out earlier than I was supposed to. My mom said it was because I was tender-headed, but I think it’s because she wanted me to assimilate and become a product of my environment. For a while I did—I hated getting braids done in my hair. My classmates hated them, aside from the other ones who were black, too. They said it looked weird. But my teacher said she loved it, even called it exotic, so the younger me couldn’t really complain at her backwards compliment.
II
When I was 4 years old, I started the process of chemically straightening my hair. The feeling of doing so would constantly burn my scalp and burn away the memory that I even had 4c coils naturally grow out of my head in the first place. Because of this, I would tell people at my predominantly white school that my hair was naturally straight. I was unknowingly assimilating to fit in with them, until I found out and would still continue to do so.
III
In my head, my hair had always been straight. I never felt the need to question it. But that part of my culture—my non-straight hair––had been burned away from my psyche.
IV
The memories of my hair burn.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
I
Imagine I Can See My Parents Dancing
In my imagination, my parents are dancing in the kitchen on 17th St., the table in front of the coal stove, the space around it just enough for them to twirl a little. My father happy as he always was to be moving. Happy to have a good time. My mother was more homebound, but in this moment, she is wearing her best dress. It is made of lace. It twirls when she twirls. In that tenement kitchen, my father is still light on his feet, before the surgery on his back that left him with a limp and dancing was something he could no longer really do,
But then they were still young, my mother newly arrived from Italy, only one baby so far. She was not a fan of wasting time, though in this image, she seems happy to be dancing with him, this man who came to Italy get her, this man she’d only known three months before she married him, and if her life had been different, if they had had more money, if she had had time for leisure, perhaps they could have danced like this. Maybe they did one night after baby Laura was asleep. Maybe they danced to music from Italy on the old radio. Maybe they did. I hope so.
Early Morning in the Empty House
When I was young, my children off to school, my husband off to his job, I would sit at the table in the empty kitchen and drink my coffee and read a book. I would give myself an hour of silence and put off my chores. That quiet time made me feel I could survive anything, even the most mundane moments, even waiting in interminable lines in grocery stores or at big box stores, even waiting in line at the bank. So many boring days to endure. That early morning quiet was my reward.
I Love the Scent of Roses
I love the scent of roses. Oh, not the ones from a florist. Those roses have no scent at all and in a day their heads hang down and turn brown. It’s roses that grow wild like the ones that climbed up the shingles of our first house, the one on Kenwood Road that we moved into right after our honeymoon. Those roses smelled better than the most expensive perfume. We would lie in our bed and the aroma would drift through the open window. When I think of that first summer, I remember the way we learned each other’s bodies, the way we’d lie in bed after making love. The scent of those roses always fills those memories with such sweetness.
Tiffany Aurelia
Aubade with the Loved and the Lost
On the other side of Salatiga, I am forever eleven, and the end of this road is a future yet to claim. Humidity slicking sweat across our backs. Rice fields kissing the length of every arm. Where the trees are still trees, my brother’s laugh still breathes against air—every syllable relearning its path back to my memory like a song loosening around the knot in my throat. My mother asking for the takeaway martabak, chocolate on my lips like a sleeping moth. In the museum of sound, my name is forever muscled into the sky of her voice; adrift in Ungaran Mountain as it peeks through tree ribs and rolled car windows to call us back to our homeland. Because stagnation is the only stability we have. Because Father winds back a clock for a steering wheel and I’m still in that car, holding on.
Daniel P. Carey Jr.
Stanley's Bees
Stanley in his seventies limps in and orders a sausage and peppers pie, scratching his face, callused fingertips scraping stubble like a rake on pavement. Some days he watches me toss dough in the air, splash sauce in mesmeric circles, but today he pulls a jar of honey from his jean jacket, tells me he keeps bees. He was five when his father in Poland kept him home to smoke hives, breed queens. While his friends played soccer, Stanley measured moisture in honey until he left home forever. He hands me the Mason jar. I hated my father and his bees. Now they bring him back to me.
Barbara Crooker
The Empty House
. . . there are days when the only thing more brave than leaving this house is coming back to it.
Jan Richardson
There’s your favorite chair, a brown leather recliner, the one you’re not sitting in. The large screen TV is silent, its blank black face. There’s no one but me in the living room, reading on the sofa, listening to jazz. I look up from the page in case you wander in for a quick hug. You don’t. The dining room, where the family gathered for holidays, is strewn with bills I need to figure out how to pay. No turkey resting brownly on the platter, no gravy singing in its open-mouthed boat. Junk mail addressed to you drifts in even though it’s been two years. The kitchen is also empty, the filter waiting for hot water to release the morning smell of coffee. Your granola grows stale in its plastic bin. And the backyard deck? Unspeakably lonely, those soft summer nights we sat in the gathering dusk, waiting for fireflies to rise from the grass. My glass of wine is now empty. The wrought iron chair wishes you were here.
Slow Dancing
the last line is by Leonard Cohen
After losing him twice trying to use the commode— so humiliating, pants puddled around his ankles, me unable to help him back up—we learn a new dance in the downstairs powder room: First, I wedge the wheelchair in the door frame. Then somehow manage to step over it, get in front. We review: feet on the floor, nose to toes, airplane arms, push off from the chair. I hook my finger in the gait belt, count to three, and up he rises. Then we dance, pivot and swivel, until both his hands are on the vanity. Side step two, back one, pants down, lower slowly onto the seat using the newly-attached bars. I snap on rubber gloves, use wipes, barrier cream. To get back in the chair, we waltz in reverse. Sashay left this time. I have to remind him to use his upper body strength, don’t collapse. We used to dance in the kitchen to Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, to the mortification of our children. I loved feeling his body next to mine, moving with the music. Because I’m still in love with you, I sing, only slightly out of tune. The real moon is there where it should be, pasted in the dark sky, round and spare as a kitchen fixture. Dance me to the end of love.
Lois Roma-Deeley
Countless
I am trying to remember you without that lost look, and the tone of your voice, flat as a tabletop mesa on the far reaches of a desert where, if this were a metaphor, that’s where I’d say you lived trapped with only the voices in your head to keep you company. What did they tell you, those voices? Before, during, and after the countless trips to the hospital; countless sessions with counselors; doctors, psychiatrists, police; countless research; phone calls, texts from us to you, pleading; countless drugs tried and rejected; countless prayers, countless fears, countless sorrow.
Let Me See You Again
if only in a dream walking along the bluffs high above Crystal Cove. And there I am, standing far below on the strand. I’ll be looking up at you, holding a shell to my ear, wanting to hear your voice coming to me across memory and time. The seagulls fly in a circle, letting out their startled cries. Relentless waves pound the shore behind me. This roaring, my aching heart, wedged between the wild distances of now and forever, carries over the water, and then comes back to me across deserted beach and above empty blue sky.
When All My Dead Gather They Speak
all at once. And the room is crowded as they stand, shoulder to shoulder, elbowing each other out of the way forming a semi-circle near my couch.
I’m not sure why they’ve come to visit on this bright Sunday afternoon. To warn me? To comfort? They talk over each other, their voices becoming one sound, unclear but sweet like how whales sing to each other over long distances, clicks and whistles navigating the deep.
Billy Thrasher
Putting Six Aspirin into My Dad’s Shaky Hand
was the first time seeing him weak. Even at the kitchen table, discussing divorce with mom, he was resilient. I repeated, six? He confirmed mm-hmm.
On the nightstand was a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. The darkness flung off his large hand now spread open.
A faint shadow sighed a thank you.
In the morning, in his rocking chair, laughing with The Lone Ranger on TV, wearing brown work pants, a jacket with large pockets, and leather boots coated in concrete and dirt, until in front of the door, he smiled, see you tonight.
Steve Straight
Tattoo
“Well, I’m not uptight, not unattractive. Turn me on tonight, I’m radioactive.”
––The Firm
Answering one of those online quizzes in my head––“How many of these have you had?”––I wade through broken bone, speeding ticket, dyed hair, divorce, measles, a piercing, until I come to tattoo and mentally shake my head.
I’m thinking of the flaming dragon on a friend’s arm, or the delicate pair of wings on a shoulder, or even my friend’s wedding ring etched in skin, but then I stop, for the answer is Yes, and even after thirty years, it all comes back:
Each morning at St. Francis the nicest people help me lie down, cover my chest with a blanket, pat me on the shoulder, speak in soft voices, then close the big door behind them. I hear a high whine and whistle, lasting less than a minute, and the nice people return, with ice water, perhaps a cookie.
All is normal for a few hours, pleasant even. At noon I wolf down my daily craving of tuna grinder. Then, walking across campus, I start to feel sick and concave. I do not even overtake the young lovers strolling aimlessly ahead of me. By afternoon I am sprawled on the couch, waves of nausea rising, trying to connect it to the nice people somehow. Did they slip something in my drink? In my cookie?
But of course the door was six inches thick, made of lead, as was the blanket, and the whine was the photon beam from a linear accelerator aimed at my abdomen and pelvis, its rays targeted by the tattoo: six tiny inked dots like a giant domino.
If the needle pricks were bright stars in the night sky, some civilization might have named them, The Great Rectangle, perhaps, or The Legless Crab. I dream my little grid is a landing strip for some craft from another world, the aliens with their ray guns here to zap me, to help me. They have come in peace, the rays are good, the runway marks help them fly without lights to the inside of my body: Welcome aliens! Welcome pilots!
Everything fades, even cancer, if it’s the right kind. Now, all those years gone by, after a shower, inspecting moles, I find the little pips on my skin, souvenirs of a dark temple I was permitted to leave.
Frederick-Douglass Knowles II
My Father's Program
Rummaging through my mother's boxes before she died,
I found my father's funeral program (March 4, 1974).
I never saw it before, had no recollection of his service, then I stopped and thought how could I?
How could I remember the date of his death when at the time, I didn't
know the date of my birth (September 25, 1973)? I couldn't help but wonder: did my mother preserve his program for me? Only me and not my eight siblings? Why didn't she tell me she had kept the last historical record of my father? Or did dementia
wrap the umbilical cord around her memory, too?
I've only seen my father's program once in 49 years, tucked it back in a box that didn't belong to me.
My mother was still alive, so I couldn't claim it for my own, but I did 3 months later when I wrote the obituary for her program. Now that box is stacked in storage filled with family, but there's only one piece that I'm writing this poem about, one that reminds me that my mother preserved a man that never saw his son grow into one, one that he would be proud of, ashamed of, too. What will I do with my father's program?
Do I even know which box in storage indexes my only not-so-memory?
My storage unit is safeguarded by my mother's watchful scent blanketing her couch, wafting over her recliner. When I knelt down to heave that unit door
to place her program (February 13, 2023) alongside his,
I inhaled what I was told was the life of my parents, the syncopation they shared dancing, the malice they made while arguing. Sometimes I wish
I would have never found my father's program. Then I could pretend he just abandoned his family. Then I could pretend it wasn't real.
John Bargowski
Homework
And after he'd clocked out of his shift at the slaughterhouse then tended bar at the D&J for a few hours so his brother-in-law could go home to soak his feet in warm Epsom salts, my father would uncap his set of red and black pens, open the ledger to do the books for the family business, and some nights I'd share the kitchen table with him, keeping my head low to the page and my pencil busy scratching through what Sister called the new math, looking for those answers I believed came so easy for him, and sometimes, when he stopped to lay down his glasses on a ledger sheet and rub a scuffed knuckle at his eyes, he'd catch me staring through his lenses at the numbers he'd jotted in the green columns, all that profit and loss blurred now, and doubled in size.
Balanced on the chop-block, another log cut stove-length from the beetle-riddled ash.
Turning 18
My boy digs his steel-toes in, shifts slender hips side to side then hefts the eight-pound maul and lets it sink behind his back as he centers and steadies the tic of the wedged head.
Stretched triceps twitch under the sweat-soaked sleeves of his tee before he draws a deep breath, tightens his grip on the shaft and swings the maul in a sweeping arc.
And for the split second both his heels leave the ground, sunlight streaks beneath his steel-toes, the thwack then of the axe head striking dead-on the crack he's eyed in the grain––that dark ring of heartwood, when struck, how it shatters.
Mennen
My teenage grandson's spent the day weaving the zero-turn
between the stones of the old Presbyterian cemetery, bits from the weed-whacker stuck in the scuffed leather
uppers of his second-hand steel-toes and the sweat-soaked
Public Works tee he's tossed on the floor of the mudroom.
And when he hello-hugs me after he's showered and shaved the fuzz from his cheeks and chin, there's no mistaking it––
that same scent of Skin Bracer my old man slapped on after his shift at the slaughterhouse. I could look at him for hours, the muscled arms, rock-solid frame, the sweet bite seeping
from his pores after a good day's work, the sting of its burn.
Robert Cording
In the Brook
John’s seven-year-old body basks in the sun next to his five-year-old sister, Hannah, the two of them stretched out on their uncle’s grave. I am explaining the flowers, stones, cans of beer, left at my son’s grave when John pulls a golf ball he found from his pocket and balances it on the gravestone.
Is Daniel here, Grandpa? It’s August 18th, Daniel’s birthday. Not waiting for an answer, he and Hannah take off toward the brook. The adults trail behind. My oldest son, John and Hannah’s father, wades in knee-deep, slowly lifting rocks so as not to raise the silt. He is telling them how their uncle Daniel and he would look for crayfish, and how Daniel, though younger, was always better at catching them as they scrabbled off backwards into his waiting hand. I listen to the water burble against stones. Whatever it has to say is not mine to know. John wants to know where the brook comes from (the lake just north of the cemetery) and then turns
his attention to the water striders that skate in the trees’ arcs of shade. The water eddies and cascades into pools of dark amber. I stand in the brook of my sons’ childhood, cupping the water that runs through my fingers like the fullness and emptiness of the day. Then Hannah interrupts my thoughts, saying she’d like the already-promised ice cream.
Filet Knives
In Florida, more than a thousand miles from their origin, my wife found two old filet knives in a drawer and quite reasonably asked, “Why do you still have these old knives?”
Their thin, slightly upcurved blades, one eight inches, one six, needed the rust sandpapered from them, and the blades oiled and sharpened on a whetstone. I did both, though I had no intention of using them. The wooden handles still held the waxy patina of hands, my grandmother’s and mine—and memories of ice chests filled with flounder and fluke,
all those weekends on Peconic Bay and Long Island Sound. But mostly of my grandmother and me late at night bent over our work, scaling then dividing each flounder down its middle before running the thin flexible blade along the spine outward to the periphery until a slab of filet fell into our hand. Then the other side. On and on, few words exchanged between us, all I needed to learn
contained in one phrase: good work, keep at it— filet after filet, rinsed and laid out to dry then bundled in wax paper and sealed for the freezer of winter’s food. I still hear the hose’s rumble of water
inside the ice chests washing blood away, and the slap and slosh of rinsing, the splash of their emptying, reddened water pooling in the driveway, the two of us just standing there, the job done.
Can’t Stop
Lao-Tzu said, Those who know are silent. I can’t stop talking about what I see, just now a jittery anole darting this way, looking for a place in the shade where I’m not. I say, Stay a while under the awning. I will keep my distance and I won’t mind if you keep me sighted in your half-lidded eyes. You can teach me how to watch clouds float by and feel, first sun, then shade. It’s foolish to talk with an anole, but I talk with my dead son all the time, letting him know what birds I’ve seen, or the feel of the morning air, or the different greens of the cordgrass. My mother truly couldn’t stop talking— I’d call her when I left work and then, forty-five minutes later, say I’m home now, and she’d have filled my entire drive, pausing only to ask, are you still there? I miss that talk, even if I’m fine with silence. Still, I cannot imagine Lao Tzu’s knowing silence, which must know what lies beyond what can be said. Maybe I will never stop talking, though not to fill some void but because the void is too full of things to talk about or report on, like this anole puffing out, then drawing in its dewlap like some silent Chinese dancer with a red fan.
Contributors
Tiffany Aurelia is a South-East-Asian writer and student from Jakarta, Indonesia. She writes to explore the intricacies of memory, heritage, time, and her cultural background. She has poems published in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Emerson Review, and other journals.
John Bargowski’s most recent poetry collection, American Chestnut, was published in 2021. His first book, Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, selected by Paul Mariani for the Bordighera Poetry Prize, was published in 2012.
Lilia Burdo recently graduated Summa Cum Laude from Eastern Connecticut State University with her B.A. in English and minor in Leadership Communication. Burdo will continue her studies by pursuing a master's degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs in the 2024-25 academic year. With the help of an Eastern Emerging Scholars Grant, she recently published her first collection of poetry, Yin Ri Bei.
Daniel P. Carey Jr. studied English and poetry writing at Eastern Connecticut State University. A past contributor to Here, he lives in Manchester, CT, with his wife Rebecca and daughters, Elle Sinéad and Áine Róisín.
Rob Cording teaches high school English in Boston, where he lives with his wife and two children. He has published poems in American Journal of Poetry, New Ohio Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review.
Robert Cording has published ten books of poetry, the most recent of which is In the Unwalled City (2022). His poems have been reprinted in two Pushcart anthologies and The Best American Poetry 2018
Aliyah Cotton is a queer poet of color from Reston, VA. She earned her MFA from Boston University where she was a recipient of the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rust & Moth, and Southern Humanities Review, and has been nominated for the 2024 Best of the Net Anthology. Aliyah lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she creates music under the moniker October Love.
Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvania writer with twelve published chapbooks, the latest being: Searching Stained Glass Windows For An Answer. She is also the author of the novella Mates Her debut book of photography, Songs of the Creek, was published in 2023.
Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry. Some Glad Morning is her latest, with Slow Wreckage forthcoming from Grayson Books.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the author of twenty-four books. Her latest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). She received the American Book Award for the collection All That Lies Between Us. She is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY.
Benjamin Goluboff is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Biking Englewood: An Essay on the White Gaze. Goluboff teaches at Lake Forest College. Some of his work can be read at https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff.
José B. González is the author of two poetry collections: When Love Was Reels, Connecticut Book Award Finalist, and Toys Made of Rock, an International Latino Book Award Finalist. He was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and immigrated to New London, CT, at the age of eight knowing no English. He is now a Professor of English at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
Elizabeth Johnson awarded first prize in Eastern's 2023 Literary Festival for High School Students Creative Writing Contest. She is a senior at Rockville High School in her fourth year of creative writing classes. She was recently named a Humanities Scholar. She hopes to continue with her writing and inspire others to write with your true voice, not with what others expect of you.
Richard Jordan's poems appear widely in distinguished journals. His debut chapbook, The Squannacook at Dawn, won first place in the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Contest and will appear in early 2024. He lives in the Boston area.
Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is a Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College. Author of the collection author of BlackRoseCity, he is the recipient of the Nutmeg Poetry Award and the Connecticut Office of the Arts Fellowship in Artist Excellence.
Paul Martin has published two books of poetry, Closing Distances and River Scar, as well as three prize-winning chapbooks. Poems have appeared in America, Boulevard, Commonweal, Here, New Letters, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review and other journals.
Sarah Mayo is a South Wales Valleys-based writer of poetry and flash fiction. She is a member of Cardiff Writers Circle and RCT Creative Writers. Her poems appear in the ‘Cardiff 75’ anthology published by Parthian Books in March 2023.
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and two chapbooks. Open: A Journal of Arts and Literature published his six-poem suite "Once There Was a Way" in its 2023 Pamphlet Series. A Pushpart Prize winner, he heads the poetry track for the MFA in Creative Writing at DeSales University.
Cait O'Kane is a poet and musician from Philadelphia. She is the author of the poetry collections Homecoming and A Brief History Of Burning
Bellana Parungao is a senior in the visual fine arts program at Eastern. They employ a variety of mediums and art styles in their work and also enjoy writing poetry.
Julia Morris Paul is author of two full-length collections, Shook and Table with Burning Candle (forthcoming in 2024), and a chapbook, Staring Down the Tracks. Her poem "Dear Coroner, How Could You Know," first published in Here, appears in the 2023 Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses anthology. She serves as president of the Riverwood Poetry Series, a long-running reading series in Hartford, Connecticut, and is an elder law attorney in Manchester, Connecticut.
Lois Roma-Deeley’s most recent poetry collection is Like Water in the Palm of My Hand (2022). Her previous books include The Short List of Certainties, winner of the Jacopone da Todi Book Prize; High Notes, a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist; northSight; and Rules of Hunger.
Natalie Schriefer is a bi/demi writer often grappling with sexuality, identity, and shame. She loves asking people about their fictional crushes (her most recent are Riza Hawkeye and Gamora). A Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared online with CNN, Wired, Insider, and NBC, among others. Find her on X (@schriefern1) or on her website at www.natalieschriefer.com.
Millyhon Stoney was awarded second prize in Eastern's 2023 Literary Festival for High School Students Creative Writing Contest.
Steve Straight’s book Affirmation won the 2023 William Meredith Award for Poetry. He is also the author of The Almanac and The Water Carrier. He recently retured after a long career as a Professor of English and Director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College.
Billy Thrasher received an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University and has published poems and essays in Dovecote Magazine, White Wall Review, As You Were: The Military Review, Dunes Review, Rougarou, and Outlook Springs.
Kimberly Yankson was awarded third prize in Eastern's 2023 Literary Festival for High School Students Creative Writing Contest.
