Swimming in the Ocean

By Max Zats

I jumped into the placid waters
bracing the cold on the hot summer day.
I took a few strokes, and looked behind me.
The hot summer heat waves were clearly visible.
As I dove underwater,
I immediately entered a kingdom ruled by fish.
All of them swimming with a purpose,
as if they were late for work, or coming back to their families.
I suddenly become aware of a pain in my side. I head back up for air.

As I am above water,
I cannot stop myself from thinking,
What goes on down there when nobody's watching?

Television

By Danny Yee

At first, it is black,
However,
With the push of a button,
It explodes with,
Color,
Greens, yellows, reds, blues,
And every color,
Imaginable,
The colors form and make pictures,
Sound resonates from the speakers,
Music, laughter, talking,
All kinds of sound come
From television,
Press another button,
And the pictures and sound change,
News, movies, sports…
Anything can be on television…

Steel Lover

By Kate Huneke

The first cut-
it wasn’t the deepest.
No, not at all.
It was like the others,
a subtle rend of
anxious skin, the gentle pulse
of crimson, just enough
to hush the demons
shrieking inside my brain.
But this time they wouldn’t
shut up. Just kept on howling, like my
unforgotten ghosts when they
were displeased and grieving.

Worst thing was, the older
I got, the more I began
to see how much I resembled
the shadowy creatures. They fell
in and out of the churning black
water, then lifted up into the white
clouds. Not high enough to feel satisfied.
We’re closer than I registered.
That day I actually
thought about screaming.
So I gave myself to the blade,
asked it to bit a little
harder, chew a little deeper.
The hot, scarlet rush
felt so delicious,
I couldn’t stop there.

The knife might have reached bone, but my brightest
star, floating on the ebony, sad velvet
layer of hate, barged into
the bathroom, found me leaning
against a loved one’s new marble
tub, turning it’s unstained
white pink.
You should have
seen his
light flicker, then go
out, like a
light bulb.

Death

By Danny Yee

There’s no way to avoid it
Yet people still try,
To avoid the clutches of death,
Eventually all of us,
Are taken,
By the cold claws of death,
Death conquers all,
Even the strongest of people,
Are taken by it,
Nobody knows,
How it is like,
Is it the vast emptiness?
Or full of joy?
You will only find out,
If death takes you…

Laughter

By Max Zats

What's better than laughing?
Whether its with friends
or by yourself.
You can find laughter
in the most random of times.

If it weren't for laughter,the world would be different.
What a sad, scary place it would be!

Laughter...the best thing ever!

Rat in a Cage

By E. Jadallah

Working your way out like a rat in a cage.
Doesn’t work when the bars are shut

When the bars are shut
You can’t get yourself out of the hole you dug.

When you can’t get yourself out of a hole,
It seems you filled yourself in.

When you realized your filled in
At the bottom of a hole it seems you’ve shut yourself in

You’ve shut yourself in
Like a rat in a cage.

Winter

By C. Burgess

Brilliant, ivory, bleached, snow,
Crunches deafeningly beneath the sable, coal-black sole of my boot,
As breath dances in a jovial circle, freely, before my eyes,
Icing, chilling, as if sitting in a freezer.
Winter.
I kicked my boot against the wall,
The flakes shaking off, like burdens descending from my shoulders,
As inside, the fire devoured wood, burning in the safety of its hearth,
And the warmth engulfed me, heating to the roots of my body.
Winter.
I press the tip of my nose against the glass, chilling, soothing, and tickling my senses,
Glazed breath fogging up the window,
And snowflakes lifelessly jingling down, settling atop a snowman.
Winter, so special.