Rainbow Rainbow Voices Voices
I S S U E O N E
I S S U E O N E
a youth-led organization and digital publication supporting young writers and artists
ON RAINBOW VOICES
We’re so excited to share the first issue of the Rainbow Voices Literary Magazine with you! Our editing team has been working hard to perfect all the submissions, and our graphic designers helped develop the front cover and inside layouts.
As a youth-led organization and publication dedicated to uplifting marginalized youth voices, we were pleased to receive several submissions that tackle complex, relevant social issues facing youth today. From poems about unrealistic beauty standards to personal memoirs about the cost of living authentically, we hope you find valuable insights, stories, and deeper meanings in these literary and artistic works we ’ ve curated.
This is our world where we put a rose on the head of a decapitated human to pretentiously capture the strife of an unimaginable iniquity for which there are no words. This is our world where 8 months after an incomparable genocide we repost an AI image a tawdry acrylic over massacre cupronickel from the bullet to make it irradiant while white people learn extra to sit in silence with Tibetan flags claiming the whole color spectrum but only in a way that suits them. They say we all have the same sky but how can we
I swear in the West our corporations weld it an extra cyan while ignoring science while the rest of the world’s is infused with arsine warnings a nescient opal masquerading as a colony of gulls. Emma Lazarus said “None of us are free ‘til all of us are free,” but no one listened— violence begets violence and the people who claim to be the most free are the most defended I wish I could incise through a soul as easily as a plane blade slices through the air but now I just wish the earth would tear and guzzle us all in except for the Palestinians.
by Halley Kunen
“Social Anxiety” by Areeba Aslam
by Kelly Su
CUENTO CORTO Grace Coffee
a short story by
“Next to the road, the blackberries tempted me, and I plucked some, filling my hands with their dark sugar. I tasted the black fruit, warm thanks to the ardor of the sun. Their juice stained my fingers like purple watercolors, and some drops painted my white shirt with the colors of a sunset.
“Seeing the colors staining my clean shirt, my father hit me across the head to teach me that I need to be careful with the clothes that I wear to your sacred house.
when the sun decided to give us a reprieve and retire below the horizon.
“While I played with the fish and the frogs, I didn’t pay attention to the state of my clothes. It was only when I returned home for dinner that I saw how filthy they were. I had left my shoes beside the water when I entered, but in the three hours that I played, they had fallen among the rocks and were full of water and mud. My starched pants were now soaked and my shirt looked more like dirt than snow.
“When I entered the house, my mother did not see me immediately because she was still finishing preparing our dinner plates.
“When she turned and saw me, She grew justly angry and gave me a hit as she sent me to change my clothes and bring dinner to my dad. Look what I am wearing.
“If you don’t learn to move faster, the world is going to leave you behind.”
my dinner?’
“‘I’m sorry sir, here it is.’
“I gave him his food as he emptied his eighth bottle.
“The light of the sunset reflected off of his fork as he tasted the meal. The bottles on the floor distorted the light, painting dark flames on the ground.
“‘Cold.’ My father looked up at me. ‘You gave me cold food.’
“Red drops painted my clean shirt like the tears of the sun.”
“And he used the bottle in his hand to teach me that I could never bring him a cold meal.
“The bottle broke and my crown broke and red drops painted my clean shirt like the tears of the sun.
“When he taught me, he revealed to me the lights of the fairies; the tiny stars that danced in my closed eyes.
“My parents saw that I had learned my lesson, and they watched me with wide smiles.
