FALL

19-20

“BEST of ISSUE” WINNER

($500 Scholarship Prize)

Chaos Theory

Just one week, just one day. Just one sharp-tongued hour &

this accident wouldn’t have worn your name. Another minute,

it is not your father who almost stutters into the crossfire.

Another second, it is not your hand the arrow pledges itself to.

Then again, you can only clasp hypothetical sentence to your

heart for so long, only regret as the tick of the clock outruns you.

For all your knowing, time is a hypothesis your home will fail

to prove. An economy where evening always follows the mourning.

Tell me what this means to you: tonight with its constellation

of grievances, tomorrow with its mantilla of blood. No one could

claim better witness than you. Face of stare, mouth of ruin–

the montage calcifying before your eyes. Even now, there is no

time to forget the way you inherit catastrophe, no forgetting

the way time bolts without a conscience. What more can come from

this besides collapsing body down the barrel of the hour? Watch it

like war story, severed palms, perfect victim in the doorway. Indeed,

this poem should end with you haunting yourself through another

motherless alley. For what is destiny if not a time-stenciled road,

or mankind if not the most volatile of metaphors.

Patrick Tong, IL, Adlai E. Stevenson High School



EDITOR’S CHOICE SELECTION

($100 SCHOLARSHIP PRIZE)

to glory of country mine

At ten and two there is a gap in my head 

when I place my flayed palm across my

chest, against the crooked plane of air-hollow

stitches and smeared red paint. Livid

above. all else. Flying darts

come to a standstill and weep infested

cityscape worlds in the darkness: one,

two lands of rising suns rolled down until

their people grow twisted and black. Livid,

above. all else. Our eyes are

pitch to the sky and drip sluggish into

the floor, when we take their tiny bodies

to thrust in stride and place them onto

curdled steel, blooming Viet red. Livid,

above. all else. Stones thrown

into a mass grave straddling corrupt lines,

and steel bars made for the little ones

who once had the chances to slip between

the gaps, breathing dead white sand air.

Carolyne Geng, CA, Amador Valley High School

ALL OTHER "CERTIFIED'  NATIONAL WINNERS

Aubade - Christina Wang, GA, Milton High School

Garden Lament - Ashley Kim, NJ, Bergen County Academies

Waves' - Emma Shoemaker, TX, West Brook High School

a walk down lafayette street - Emmy Song, MD, Montgomery Blair High School

Fault Lines - Erin Brennan, MI, Detroit Country Day School

Smoke Boys - Abbey Jean Wrobel, UT, Venice High School

O U T E R  S P A C E - Christina Duan, PA, Central Bucks HS West

In Conscious - Isha Rajput, CA, Henry M. Gunn High School

avenue - Brock Daumler, WI, Green Bay East High School

The Eyepatch King - Libby Terrell, VA, Western Albemarle HS

             Wonderlust/ You'll Understand When You're Older -                Ashley Schilling, LA, Fountainbleau High School

Coming Soon -- Snake Year - Jin Yan Ye, NY, Brooklyn

The Gallows - Gabrielle Sheehan, NY, Spencerport High School

Stars of Abraham - William Deans, CA, Branham High School

a dragon before hedges - Lian Zhu, CA, California Academy of Mathematics and Science

Jigsaw Falling Into Place - Abigail Connelly, VA, Western Albemarle