New Jersey High School Poetry Contest
Winners'
Poems 1998
A Chapbook of poems by the 20 winners of
Rutgers-Newark
1998 Ninth Annual
New Jersey High School
Poetry Contest
Open to all high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Sponsored by:
Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-Newark
and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
Judges:
Patricia Bender
Louie Crew
Barry Seiler
Contest Director:
Louie Crew
Editor:
Barry Seiler
Office of the Dean
Faculty of Arts and Sciences-Newark
360 Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard
Newark, New Jersey 07102
973-353-5213
© 1999 by Rutgers-Newark for the poets. No part of this document may be reproduced in any format without the written permission of the author.
Sara Amoroso
Voorhees High School
I was the one with
slender memories,
little slivers
tiny shards
slipping through my hands.
I only could recall
odd details
in one confusing heap.
My sister’s eyes
are flamboyant blue.
Her father’s
are the same shade,
only colder.
I never could
remember everything.
It made me tired.
So I slept.
Sara Amoroso
Voorhees High School
The wind shakes
my house and asks it
to dance,
but only the shingles
hitch up their skirts.
My house stands firm
like a pastor in a nightclub,
glaring at the girls from his
congregation when he sees them dance.
The wind blows harder,
my door creaks,
and the pastor taps his toe.
My screens are shaking
like community-theatre thunder,
joining the shingles in their dance.
And if I lay still,
I can feel that minister,
My foundation,
begin to sway
to the wind’s compelling bass line.
Kara Becker
Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child
Clarisse
Grandma takes my hand and we walk across the park
skirting the restrooms with the faded yellow signs
so we can throw graham crackers to the ducks.
She wears slippers even though we are outside
and says “When I am eighty-five I will dye my hair purple.”
I hold her hand but keep it hidden behind my long jacket-I’m not a child
who needs a hand or a spirited retelling of My Fair Lady, songs and all.
Nowadays I talk of boys, and fingernails, and driving with a seatbelt
and tell her- “I’m seventeen and I’m crazy.” She just laughs.
She doesn’t believe me about the crazy part.
We stumble a little on a jagged piece of the walk
and I ask “What is it like to be old?”
She say I would know better than her anyway and for God sakes
throw my shoulders back.
We walk then in silence and I imagine her at seventeen, feeling so old,
so full of confused energy and cigarettes, walking straight-spined
to the pictures with Charles Lindbergh or climbing the 300-year old apple tree
in a gully in her backyard when none of her silly, giggly friends were looking.
She hugs the thick trunk to her cheek,
breaks off a slim branch and brandishes it to the sky
with a cry of “I am Joan of Arc! I am Hera, goddess of the earth!”
The trees are pale green and gold, and sunlight filters through the waxy leaves
like thick cream. She hunches over to grasp their spidery softness,
and they wrinkle against here cheek, softer than the trunk
and somehow warm at that high altitude. The sky is fuzzy, diffused blueness
floating above the hard line of the horizon. I can see her smiling.
Nowadays she finds the sky fuzzy, but I suspect it’s her
prescription glasses
that diffuse the glare through the trees
because she’s always screaming “Darn the government!” in the general
direction
of the heavens. We walk by the restrooms now,
and I stumble because I am staring at the sky.
It is Grandma who steadies me, straightening my gangly legs
even though her slippers scuff across the concrete of the walk.
We head towards the street, leaving the pond and the ducks to do as they please,
and I say “When I am twenty-five I will climb all the Appalachian mountains.”
She just smiles, because I think twenty-five is so old, and so does
she.
Kara Becker
Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child
For those preaching temperance-
love,
he falling listless,
she swimming drunk with mist
under
iron hands gripping pounding heart,
you are always true my beloved centaur.
shelter her from the rocks,
the breaking waves.
use me.
has he?
you are music
sounding frantic light
from her center
the pit of my stomach
and I love him
though before I was lighthouse-bound
the fog thick and freezing
torn from you, torn from her.
Now the cacophony has brought me home
to his unyielding arms.
Michael Bodel
Princeton Day School
1
The deer come
to drink,
these copper afternoons,
and wait
by the crab-apple tree.
Hear the rush of beating wings.
The geese gently graze
the water
before landing.
2
The wind across the fields,
the vines.
I call you toadflax,
sweet thistle, couch grass.
3
Sitting on the edge,
I grip the dock,
the weathered umber planks.
My finger bones bend
and whine
under the pressure.
The splinters
pierce my skin,
stain the wood.
4
The last light pours
over the mountain ridge,
embraces my reflection.
Michael Bodel
Princeton Day School
| i i won’t wait, until i have forgotten and you have died. i won’t wait for the soil to pack its way through your coffin, into your mouth. i’d rather write this in life, than in memory. ii |
iii what strange art is dying the way the fear, hiding deep in your bones, seeps through the hollows and muscles. hangs, like smoke from your skin. when was the fear so great |
Wileen Chen
Atlantic City High School
rocked
side to side
a vase fell
overhead
and smashed
airsick bags filled
incense burned
babies cried
people started to pray
a woman screamed
tried to open
the emergency exit
my voyage to america
Wileen Chen
Atlantic City High School
he lay hidden
beneath fluorescent
lights, moth-eaten cloth
between his legs.
lucy checks
if her breasts
are in place,
hops into a cab.
eleven floors up,
a man bleeds
into an ice
bucket.
Carolyn Chun
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
I finish writing the essay she will hand in under her name,
and I print it out so she will pass high school
and her brother is dying for her to leave for Penn State,
and her mother is probably hoping she’ll be okay,
the same as the other mothers of to-be college freshmen
and she’s probably hoping she did a good job
and she’s hoping her Miriam will come back the same way she left,
because this is the way of the mothers of pre-freshmen,
her mother will not think of the drastic change that came over her when
she began college,
and somehow she knows that she’s going to be saying good-byes forever,
somehow she knows that from now on she’s going to be saying good-byes forever,
and somehow she knows that Miriam is leaving her forever
so she holds onto her to make sure she’s still there before we go to lunch
but Miriam isn’t thinking this because
Miriam isn’t her mom and so Miriam
hands in the essays and finishes her math courses
and smiles and waves as her mother’s home becomes
more and more distant
and she goes to college and
she realizes that she isn’t Miriam after all
she’s a business major and
now she’s working and paying taxes
and now she’s doesn’t go back home
and her mother knew she wouldn’t but is sad anyway
Carolyn Chun
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
Sometimes I think that life is full of empty spots.
But then I see you,
bent over your heavy work in the garden,
wide-brimmed hat spilling spotted shadow across
your wind-worn face
as you sculpt the rain-softened soil.
Or you are tying a new tree to wooden stakes,
to guard against wind-bidden crookedness,
probably pink Spring blossom petals
also wind-bidden
streaming against your always perfect face,
and you are probably singing, too.
Then my first thought is that I am a cherry tree,
that I am one of the powerless who finds knowledge
only to give it away,
dancing as the wind says dance and
singing as the rain says sing and
even breathing by the sun’s word,
tended to by an immaculate gardener,
clean of the power of the wind now and
the rain and
the sun,
guarded as a wild flower.
Then I think that in the reflection that is always
in your eyes,
I am becoming a
gardener.
Jolia Sidona Einstein
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
I saw her for the first time in years
as the diner late Friday night.
She said something like
Didn’t we go to camp together?
and I said something like Yeah.
But what I wanted to ask
was if she still remembered the night
we met by the river, then held hands
as we climbed up the hill to her bunk.
When she’s alone in the dark,
does she feel my fingers
covering her eyes, her forehead
bumping against mine?
I wanted to tell her I can still feel her moist
voice against my lips saying Don’t look,
just pretend I’m a boy.
I just stood there, nodding,
she smiled politely,
then introduced me to her date.
I introduced her to mine,
and gave his hand a tight squeeze.
Jolia Sidona Einstein
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
Their marriage was arranged
like flowers. Her elbow bent
to wrap around his. They came
by ship to settle in America.
Cut off from their roots,
they grew apart.
My mother was left wounded.
A phone call from a neighbor
reported that I was sitting
in the yard, eating the dirt.
I was pulled from my mother,
replanted eight times,
each foster parent a paid potter.
While walking on the street,
I sometimes pass a Korean man
and wonder if he is my father.
I sometimes come across
a white dandelion
and snap it from the ground.
I hold it to the sky,
love that it is not a flower,
then scatter the seeds.
Mike Essig
Randolph High School
August 3rd, 1997.
It is a vintage evening. The food has spoiled. The bread is stale. The music is stale.
Even the air is stale and unbreatheable.
Everything is tired and used up.
Burroughs died last night.
No more naked meals.
Only audio recordings of works such as
“The Priest They Called Him” are left.
There is an incomparable emptiness that feels much like silence.
The Priest is done,
as is William Lee.
Both are dead now.
That is all.
Nothing else tonight,
anyway.
Mike Essig
Randolph High School
Okay Folks,
There is an eight year-old girl who resides in a psychiatric
hospital in some anonymous town in Pennsylvania.
She is a faceless specimen who began torturing little animals soon
after she mastered the art of walking.
She attempted to murder her parents at age seven, and that is what
put her in the old facility.
Things aren’t too bad for her.
Like the free rain we have over breathing is her mastery of time.
She participates in many of the normal activities of a young girl like
coloring, playing with dolls, and the rest of the like.
She also tries to find an unfortunate little animal that has
wandered onto the hospital premises.
She has no need for people, education, or any other component
of our little fractured society.
She can spend her time staring at the intersecting wall edges
in her little white room, and life isn’t even a
flickering notion.
She is incomplete,
She is a fragment,
but she has it where she wants it and
that’s brilliant.
Leah Faust
South Brunswick High School
“I say, ‘Leah, I am the only one, tell me.’ and she says, ‘You’re not the only one, but you’re the best, Danny.’ ”
-Daniel Vigil
48 hours with me will reveal EVERYTHING.
My eyes open wide at the suggestion.
He says they are beautiful and exotic.
He says he dreams of my naked back;
asks me how my skin feels
asks me what I’m ready for-
He says I turned his world.
My body raises temperature.
He says I make him anxious
I ask why
He tells me it is difficult to explain.
He thinks he is in “love” with me.
I race the path to his words,
he measured-
568 steps.
Who says distance will keep us apart?
Leah Faust
South Brunswick High School
I am staring at this swell,
Gracie sees it-
She watches me for a reaction
any reaction will do.
I press my finger against the cheek,
pallid springing back.
Gracie turns her head
she obviously does not approve.
We sit, holding hands,
keeping our lunches down,
eyes focused on the carpet.
It has been 6 hours.
Gracie and I put a blanket over it.
Cluttering the living room floor, ten thousand matches are struck,
each lighting an oil lamp.
I stand back as Gracie dances around the body,
carefully outlining the body with lanterns.
we, in awe, watch the chamber illuminate with countless fireflies.
Gracie strikes the last match, 10,001, and places it between her
teeth.
Opening her closed eyes
she spits the spark onto the cheap polyester cover.
I stare at Gracie, cased in flames
I watch the body, haloed in brilliant amber.
I put on my shoes,
look at the clock:
It is 1:00a.m.
Elizabeth Gorman-Hansen
High Point Regional High School
One
Woman who makes the smudge of eyeliner
a mysterious purpose.
Who always had one, clean line
from the back of the ankle up to the top,
your man is leaned over the pool table.
With each step your body sways,
your hair is oily sensual,
and your man is not worthy.
Two
Where is the clean line?
It ceases to exist in the race and smoke halos
of fast track life.
Woman of ivory stature, when you bathe
and lean out an open window
you are enough to make my lips tremble.
Three
The next color stained my lips,
cranberry juice on white velvet.
A woman can pray in the bed
where her money is crumpled near.
A woman’s prayer can be steaming water,
eyes clamped shut, a soft hum,
and a finally clean body.
Four
Walk so the light of goddess shines on the crown
of your rich hair.
Eye the stranger with a stranger eye
and clench the strong jaw.
Be a monk beneath the scanty garb
this is your uniform.
You are more than the paint on your face.
Your are more than skin and grace and taste
and beauty.
Five
It was the fifth night.
The moon was bear,
curled into her own body.
My food was a berry to be eaten
without a smile.
I remember a time when I alone
knew the secrets of my ripe body.
That time has come again.
Woman, sing from the heart
that holds a part of each man
you have eaten.
Trod upon their seeds,
dance with grace,
seduce yourself
tonight.
Elizabeth Gorman-Hansen
High Point Regional High School
I
He wore mystery like a handkerchief,
stuck in a velvet sleeve for effect.
I lifted my skirts to my hips
(Passion would seduce his depths).
He said I smelled of earth and onion.
II
She was a bride of meringue content,
sweet plastic smile and soft curls.
Urchin flower girl rid the aisle of petals,
throwing onion peel in ecstatic
hope.
III
My first son begged his simple wife
to pose for a painting.
Never ha I noticed her aroma,
her oriental slant.
The paint was made of onion.
IV
My Great Aunt made onion soup,
and with each slice of onion went a finger.
We ate of her, and our children
will have her blood in their mouths.
I visit her grave in my stomach.
Pam Grossman
Lakewood Preparatory School
your mouth
is
full of sparks
when i
suck your
teeth
my tongue is
shocked
and my
lips
glow
electric.
i ripple and shudder
like i am made of sea.
Pam Grossman
Lakewood Preparatory School
i know you love her
but she is all spikes and silver
her eyes are soup
and her lips are sharp.
she is your plain parasite
and she clutches you as if you were
the only thing that keeps her
alive.
one day, you’ll snap her arms off,
you’ll break free,
and i will skate my fingers down you spine.
my collarbone will bloom beneath your kisses
as a rainbow sizzles in the sky.
one day, you will reach to me.
Jennifer Hardy
High Point Regional High School
I
The fading of a memory
The Renaissance of the tree
The remains of an orange.
II
Rings of identical importance
Disguised by the inside
Never to hear the silent beauty.
III
Shedding into pieces
Like a puzzle
Without the finish
Leaving a link
To the outside world
Through an orange peel.
IV
The skin is the lure
On the line of the orange.
V
And I drink
The juice protected by the shield
An unacknowledged occupation.
VI
The fruit is sweet
The rind is bitter
The orange is only human.
VII
To live as an orange
Is to grow in the womb
To be peeled away from your support
And be devoured by the outside world.
Jennifer Hardy
High Point Regional High School
After 700 years
You discover the writer’s life in New York City.
First read about yourself and the romantic in you,
Then you’ll see principals.
Surprise someone you love with a flock of chickens,
Talk about warm holiday wishes...
You say you don’t know how you will ever survive without
me.
Try a martini, it’s a good start.
Just trying to keep it dry.
You wait on 42nd street for the bus
Remembering the storm of the tomatoes.
Ironic that the bus broke down on 39th.
But you wait for it as I did for the mail,
None came today, not even your letter, Demaris.
Olivia Harman
Princeton Day School
When the evening was over
she slid herself
out into the moonlight
and followed the smoke as it
danced down her throat.
She held tighter to that cigarette
than any boy’s sweaty shoulders.
In all her escapes out the breezy window,
she never once remembered the boys
she’d learned to dance with
or those passion poems she’d put herself into.
And she stayed hungry and satisfied
dancing through midnight
and forgot how to sleep.
Olivia Harman
Princeton Day School
In the rearview mirror she can see whole cities disappearing into blurs of lights. She watches the traffic lights coming towards her. Through flashing windshield wipers she sees streets drowned. She pulls to the side of the road for the map.
She parks by the neon Motel sign and crawls into the back seat. The people don’t see the figure crookedly stretched over seat belts. She waits crumpled in the back, twisting over sharp seat belts, pockets empty, blanketless.
The rain continues even through sunrise and she cranks hard onto the gas pedal. Or maybe it isn’t rain and maybe she’s crying but same effect, she turns the windshield wipers fast as possible. Her sneakers are untied, and if they’re twisted she will crash, she marvels, until she pulls over for a double knot. She dreams of styrafoame coffee cups, even bad coffee, even instant, but she is penniless. She rolls the word inside her hungry tongue, tries to swallow it.
Finally she does crash, swirving a little and missing a post. She wants to tell the other car how sorry she is, to let them inside her tiny VW, to show them how easy it is to let the steering wheel slip, to ask for a cigarette, dollar, a conversation. They speed towards an exit without stopping. She pulls over to survey the bruises and bleeding.
Desperate for a cheeseburger or even a band-aid, she marvels that she could starve, but would have to stop driving
Miles of traffic lights later, she is pulled over by the red of the
telephone booth. They tell her to wait in the car-don’t move-oh thank god, thank god
you’re all right. Don’t move-where are you again-oh thank god, we’re coming
right over. She slides over the seatbelts. They dig into her stomach like blades.
Jennifer Lee
North Highlands Regional High School
There were days, do you remember
under the young afternoon sun
that faded over long hours of us
Sipping grape juice with flexi straws,
we were bronzing in the Caribbean
“Where is that, anyway?”
And your little sister brought us cocktails
at the snap of a finger
We ate carrotsticks in rations
atop the highest branches of that Chinese Maple
whose roots were grown deep in your front yard
And the world was down below
Perhaps a sea of sharks, or
a million and one tarantulas
We waited for someone to save us,
but no one ever did
We were the only ones alive
Then I listened as you told me all about
that boy, the one in your science class,
with sandy brown hair, clear blue eyes,
and expensive sneakers he played basketball in
How he liked to pull on the ends of your hair
And you told me how soft his lips were, against your face
Now there will be days, I know
When you’ll tell me of your first
how you bled on your lovely white sheets,
the ones you were practically born in,
your mother’s gift to you with love
And there will be days
when the sun will get tired of us
and go down
*Title is taken from a poem by Lois Marie Harrod
Jennifer Lee
North Highlands Regional High School
You flicked a salt crystal into my
right eye with your deadly pretzel piece.
One time, you spit a piece of your cheeseburger
onto the front of my shirt,
leaving a yellowish tinted wet dab.
When you chew with your mouth open,
I can see the food being turned into ooze,
and getting stuck between your front teeth.
You never accept a toothpick when I offer,
and by the way,
your shirt is not a napkin.
Julia Ruth Minsky
The Dwight-Englewood School
The difference is a road
running fast between us
and traveling down that spine
an ancient history of your fingerprints.
In sleep, you lay your hands against me,
parting the hemispheres of my back.
Her shoulders are not blades,
you tell your brother,
They are the broken ends of her fallen wings.
I want to tell you that I am still an angel,
guarding well the Atlas of your body,
wherein I built cities of love,
older than the Elizabethans,
upon the broad plane of your stomach.
I’ll confess to it in this light:
I travel you.
There are rivers in the soft pulse at your wrist,
a cave for my toe behind your knee,
a deep valley at the base of your back,
where I bury my hands,
and the bridge of your neck for my lips.
A fist of light crashes through the morning,
your body unfolds like a map,
and I take up the roads of your bones
to ride the sinews like a native traveler.
I let my tongue explore the geography
of your mouth,
and taste the flesh behind your cheek.
I find your origins on every continent
and tell you: you can live on me alone.
While the shape I take is one of water,
slowly filling the dim holes of your construction,
here is the body yet left to travel:
The deep, notions of oceans within me.
where we speak in different languages,
where we are young and meant to live forever.
I will not let you die,
with centuries of love
still standing on your back.
Before you do,
I will rise up,
and burn your cities to the ground.
Julia Ruth Minsky
The Dwight-Englewood School
You fishing by midnight
unearthing ages of pond-bottom funk
murky eddies disrupt the chaste
dark water surface. Ablaze with moonlight,
a musk-of-damp ground your shroud. Silver finned
riptides serate black depths below,
eyes wide fearful.
The pronged hook sharp snares my icy
lip,
rips me free of the water as if uprooted
from
a flower bed. My body
smooth-scaled sleek-muscled
twitching still, and gills very fine
breathing still.
Raised in darkness my whole body
in minutes filleted open in torn-flesh
redolence.
Vertabrae fall like wilted petals.
Proud of your catch and the new rod, a gift from a friend
but to my cold flesh clings still
the cool taste of late-August nights, the damp bog-thresh
bitter now clear. Going home
the fist-clenched dead fish your palms too
are moistened softened and fresh, as if brushed by
rain. A red rain.
Kate Nardin
Leonia High School
A monkey took my mother by the hand,
and pushed her off the yellowed cliff.
She fell as though she were
a bright pink ostrich plume.
Her voice came up to me,
as she splashed into
the lime green sea.
I was too high to hear, I was
a jewelled hawk
before it dives.
I sang with all my magic.
I sang the song of time.
I wiped black-berry black
from my face and bitter paws,
scrubbing with dark floating clouds
racing about my head.
And I made some wings
from a red, red kite
that I caught as it flew by.
Kate Nardin
Leonia High School
A dirt path winds through the willows,
encircling the smooth green-coated pond.
Black leather snouts of turtles
and the sleek green heads and golden eyes
of bullfrogs
break the pale surface
in the shadow of dark logs
reaching up at oblique angles.
Mud-coloured bumps
lay on sun-warned wood.
They disappear under the pistachio cream
as dead grass
announces our arrival.
The birds were flying
with frantic beats of vibrating wings,
echoing each other’s song.
Now they fall silent and motionless.
A slim blue heron stands on one leg;
the other yellow limb is held
gracefully bent
under his breast.
His angel wings are spreading,
rimmed in light,
testing the weight of the air.
He stretches his thin neck --
and flies away over the water.
We hear him call,
furious that we have invaded his kingdom.
The birds are no longer quiet.
They only sound quiet, now.
We stay a little longer.
Cattails are standing in ranks,
whip-thin green sentinels
about to ford a river.
Some trail into the water
as the rest shift their bayonets,
waiting expectantly on the banks.
We turn,
and trek back to the highway
we belong to.
Behind us,
the birds begin again their songs.
Victoria Nicholson
Academy of St. Elizabeth
Here we are again,
staring up another exhaust pipe
headlights resting on the road’s shoulder
two spewing heat through the vents
so in breathing we are filled up too.
Warm space, small
contained, safe and waiting
almost in contact with the
halted red; there, then gone
like a signal. Eager to join
others of their kind-
our kind, fickle; stop and start
eyes glaring scared, and they scour.
The look I’ve seen in a dog
when someone had stepped too soon,
their error lurching and bouncing back
room to lantern corneas - blinded
by the disrespect.
Here we wait, to join
a thousand other spaces
all in constant motion-
me, loyal beacon, held high and
nestled like a puppy.
and you following, following
the white line disappearing in front of us
As we push the warm air,
backwards and forwards, between us.
Victoria Nicholson
Academy of St. Elizabeth
We shared
that space
both tied
to the same
nourishment
together in the
same house
with walls
of our mother’s flesh
and windows
of our mother’s ears-
we were together then
in that room
unchanged and alike
with no need
to compete for
an ensured survival.
They had to fashion
a door for us,
lifting us from
our original home
and severing our union
in that communal dwelling.
Now,
walls of wood
stand between us,
and windows
open to different
sounds, different sights--
we can see
with our own eyes--
hear with our own ears.
Mathew Sokolski
Holy Cross High School
I knew old Jack Kerouac,
I knew all those cock-eyed things he did.
I knew all the beatnik bobbin’
all the whorehouse shopping’
all the lonely nights walking the floor
with Miles Davis playing in the background
as you danced alone with Jack Daniels.
I knew the man who saw visions of Cody
and Girard,
visions of morphine,
and benzedrine,
and of old Neal Cassidy.
I knew all the gettin’ down days
with Allen and Peter,
all the sad and empty days in Lowell,
all the, “Let’s commit suicide together days,”
down by the rails at Union Station.
I think about all the buggered days
accompanied with two shots of whiskey
and a day in bed.
All the dreams of Buddha
and doctors carrying saxophones.
I was there with Tim Leary
in the back of that Volkswagen Bus
as we smoked our way down the open road.
I was that dark, scarecrow hitchhiker
on my way to “Sunny Californy”
tied to the road by my old brown raincoat.
I was the fag without a typewriter
while you sat alone in Mexico
and I peeked through a hole in the wall
as the hallucinogenic ghosts shook you to sleep.
I think I loaned you fifty cents in 1954
way up on Mount Fugi,
I watched you hawknosed
in the court of Prince Avalokitesvar
as we meditated to Allen’s maniacal voice.
I wrote with you and “Old Bull” Burroughs
at a chateau on Bourbon Street
as the slack-jawed hippos
passed by our milky white eyes.
I was the quiet blond haired hitchhiker
who sat next to you on the back
of that broken down flatbed truck
that was shooting like a star toward Denver.
I went with you
from the liquor store in Jersey,
to the pharmacy in San Francisco,
to the college at Berkeley,
to the Buddhist temples in Tangiers,
to the apartment in Hoboken,
to the motels in Mexico,
to the bars all around the world,
to heaven,
to hell,
and to parts unknown.
I watched as you scattered pomes and poems,
I felt it as you sang your blues,
I remember as you screamed at God in the middle of the night,
I smiled at you as you played harmonica with Dylan,
as the flames jiggled their way into your eyes.
I knew Jack Kerouac,
all that hitchhikin”
all that railroadin’
all that comin’ back to America.
Yeah, I knew the Jack
that was a good writer before a drink,
a great writer after one drink,
and a prophetically brilliant writer
after a week full of drinks.
I knew Jack Kerouac
I watched as his burnt-out brain shivered him
to the end of the road
at an empty apartment in Saint Petersburg.
I never met Jack Kerouac
and never really wanted to.
Ryan St. Clair
Westfield High School
The Polynesians found their islands by following the
luminescent lightning of plankton under moonlight,
great living spokes of the island-chain wheels,
revolving slowly under the stars.
Our guidelines are less subtle,
the fiercely burning highways of the coastal plain,
diving out of the Watchung hills
and racing for the great glowing city,
where the vault of the sky touches the skyscrapers,
and lights the heavens a dull maroon haze.
Should we dip and turn our paddles east,
and try to find landing for our boats on the burning shore
Or should we turn and leave this glowing wheel behind?
I have heard that it is crowded and hungry.
There are still breaks in the maroon haze
and stars to guide us.
Ryan St. Clair
Westfield High School
It has been suggested
that every left hander
is the mirror view of a right-handed twin
dead in the womb when only a seed
but my left hand is blind and dumb
no brother has died to give me life
not waiting
nor watching
but who
if not my left-handed brother
could walk the other path
see around the corners I’ve passed
know what marvels I had sped by
diamonds in the road
But he is not
and never was
my left hand mocks my regrets
and I will never touch
the face in the mirror
Tonia Stevenson
Atlantic City High School
open window
in the winter
blue blanket
on a rocking wooden chair
green apple
on the closet shelf
and a fruit bowl
on the table
Tonia Stevenson
Atlantic City High School
black and white hair
carpets pink skin
white claws
in the heel
of my foot
blood
in the tup
and tears
clear
like glass
on my face
Emily Van Duyne
Atlantic City High School
Recall, at age ten
a visit to Nags Head
that coastal barrier of North Carolina sand and legend
where you, staid enough by day three
to plunder the local bookstore
purchase the red and leather
Tales of the Outer Banks,
half drunk blood in a skull on the cover
the jacket alive with summoned pirates,
and the disregarded maidens that await them,
alive in their crazy midnight song
that Roddy Pedanski, of Kitty Hawk,
had glimpsed, alone in a whiskey bottle,
late in October ‘36.
So that was what you did
in that land afloat with locals
who drawled of mullet and the Bait and Tackle,
schooled yourself in their myth
in Blackbeard promises to Martha Pliver,
learned how he would make all the fish in the sea
swim to her shore on one night each year
and some say if you listen you’ll still hear
her song for her captured lover, her soprano brogue refrains,
while fishermen wade to their waist
herald buckets and nets
to gather tog and crab
and look for a moon ridden pirate galley
or a plaited auburn lock by the lighthouse,
flapping in the wind.
And speaking of the beacon
there was that other story
the prologue
how Nags Head caught its name
how the wreckers strung lanterns
ancient bobbing luminance
around the helpless heads of horses and led them on the shore-
And when the ships,
those Spanish fleets of brocade, silk, and thyme
trickled through the shrouded Southern mist
how the bobbing head of the nag
trotting by the shoals would fool them
belie false harbor
so they would crash, wreck
splinter their fleets on the jetty
divulge their treasures to the frozen, thieving sea.
Emily Van Duyne
Atlantic City High School
At each cathedral
I would spare 1500 lire,
a ten franc piece for the sake
of a reddened glass flame
and whispered half prayer
to my strange ungod
that I muddled no closer to
in those medieval temples
than in my own stained glass house-
for you,
who I barely knew.
Uncle John,
who tickled me and called me shrimp
then disappeared for years,
my born again Christian uncle
who was raised Catholic,
married a Jew
and was buried in a Mennonite cemetery
while Aunt Susan
read Kaddish upon your grave.
But I was so fifteen
as I caressed Italian streets
bathed in a human netting
drunk on first coffees
and lithe packs of cigarettes,
and though somewhere
I knew you drew near to dead
I thought perhaps
husky entreaties would resound more
in the hallowed ground
of Notre Dame, St. Peter’s Basilica.
on the simple archaic altar of St. Francis.
Now I know.
I know
as I ambled across chalky frescoes
that your tumor inhaled each cell
and your breath shallowed-
that, as my loving eyes
tread on French masters
and I sailed through
the buggy, mud waters of the Seine
the vacuum in your brain
scooped holes in the
pastry beneath flaky eye sockets.
Later,
I handed mother a mass card
indecipherable in French
a thick, engraved manila page
gilt edged, with painted daisies
and a gorgeous, bloody Christ.
It sits in her mirror, still
next to the rosewood beads from the Vatican.
How could I explain
that Michaelangelo
was nearer than God to me at the Sistine Chapel?
That lighted piazzas were more, sweeter,
than Catholic shrines?
That her dear brother,
her beatified exile,
had been,
those days,
My afterthought?