New Jersey High School Poetry Contest
Winners' Poems1997
A Chapbook of Poems
by the Winners of
Rutgers/Newark's 1997
© 1997 by Rutgers University for the poets and used here with their permission.
May not be reproduced in any other place.
Contents
Michael C. Berecz
Edison High School
It's just like the first time you have a conversation with
Jesus. The priests don't matter. The frowns don't change.
The funny old joke you'd normally laugh at slides slowly off
the lunch meat counter. It's at three or four. You look at
He and He onto you and eyes never avert to the clock prescribing
dawn. "Listen to me, boy, and love your mother, 'cause she
loves you. And eat your vegetables, 'cause they matter and
all that Popeye stuff. And be a strong lover, and kiss well,
and always pursue blondes." That's all but an arm on your
shoulder, and off in the distance someone else is listening,
rolling in the dust, telling
joke upon joke.
Return to Contents
Michael C. Berecz
Edison High School
comfortably reclining in the kitchen
eating cold Kielbasa from
the night before
remembering her homeland on this warm May night
and whispering to herself in
Polish about her mother
my grandmother
who died of TB when she was four,
she is now in America
and has been since 1966
a congressional election year when conservatives
reigned supreme and limited immigration-
she has since married,
met and wed a Hungarian in 1971;
has two kids,
one in 1975, the other in 1979,
both more American than European
but the younger with a more Polish look than the older;
and worked and loved and survived
America right in the middle of it
it is now 1996, and the young immigrant girl
celebrates 30 years of democracy
but not really,
married twenty-five years,
boys just reached 17 and 21,
husband near retirement
she is my mother, I am 17 the poet,
my brother the scientist,
my father the realist
I rarely see her anymore-
she asleep when I come home Saturday drunk and
I asleep when she goes out for Monday work and
I still see her eyes and I am her in every aspect
and why haven't I been back to Poland
for the 30 years I've hoped to
and why don't you work harder and
why don't you dress better and
why do you eat piza when I've made a
perfectly good pot of stuffed cabbage and
why do you know every US President but not
1 Polish King
and why haven't I taken you to Poland
in the 17 years I've hoped to?
I see her every time I creep closer to drunkeness
eyes wide waiting for me
with my father snoring loudly
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Carolyn Chun
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
walking through
the pines - pushing the
spider black away,
curving my own path...
I was looking in the darkness,
Black was spreading to fill the pages that
Did not seem to hold words, but like wet ink, like bruises,
Blue and black runs,
After the street light quickly passed.
Shadow did not settle in like a dark and foreign nightmare,
But natural and acute and unthreatening like
Confusion but not wanting to care, like
Being afraid of the dark and sleeping through it...
walking through
the black - pushing the
spider pines away,
curving my own path...
Green light from the clock below the dashboard was softly
Unchanging.
Holding up one of many papers, the thin-green light only gave back distortions.
Ink that ran together,
Quick flashes of blinding white were from fast moving street lights like
Answers to unasked questions.
For use later, maybe, the surrounding darkness was thin and light and
Acute...
Who asked for this verse anyway? I've forgotten.
Who wrote it for me to call mine? I can't think and I'm sure I've forgotten.
How did it go? What was I supposed to be looking
For?
pushing my
own black away - curving
through the pines,
the spider path - walking...
Open the window. The air is crisply too fast;
Feels like water between my teeth,
Cuts away all thoughts of all sense of aging and fog,
Makes me feel more like streams than stagnant,
Confusion falls heavily out of the window; dives,
I realize, abruptly, that they are my papers,
Hundreds of papers,
Paving the road behind us in piles of disorganization and
Art I had not known capable of them:;
I smile...
pushing the
pines away - the spider
walking - curving,
I've forgotten:
forgotten...
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Carolyn Chun
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
I remember the soon to be shattered, now lost, innocence of
imaginary friends, left for
better things, the exact care taken for something as exactly
not there, the precise amount of space that was
not taken up, but might have been if anything so perfect could exist,
in more than imagination.
Now I am plagued by you,
your easy address on incredible letters
whose layers only you could understand, or, I guess now, not
understand, now I am plagued by you,
somehow completely foreign to me and my letters,
somehow not what you were supposed to be.
You were supposed to be a silhouette,
I remember now,
and turning my eyes from your dark shape in front of the sun,
I was supposed to blink your image into the back of my
skull, into some space in my mind that had been reserved for
you, some space that you did not fill when you arrived like this,
completely solid.
The meaningful letters of your name have dissolved, into
something tangible, something nothing like yourself.
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Sal Cinquemani
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
So we talked about various fruits.
I explained that my position on kiwi
was a ploy to reel my women in.
She laughed in the way that she does
and revealed that she hated when people say
That's funny without laughing.
We laughed.
She asked me if I thought she could be grapes
or strawberries.
I quickly answered no,
explaining that she was simply not a fruit
which came in bunches.
She spoke of clementines,
exotic papayas, and sun-dried apricots.
I decided she was a peach,
simple,
soft and sweet,
with a very thin skin.
She disagreed,
explaining that she didn't want to be fuzzy.
Without laughing I said,
That's funny.
Return to Contents
Sal Cinquemani
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
It's almost as if I don't recognize your sweaty palm on my arm,
pulling me outside.
It's almost as if I can't hear the laughter
and I can't feel my brother beside me.
He's stronger.
I'm the one who thinks.
He whispers over and over
Don't cry, please, don't cry,
like the time I got stung.
But I did anyway.
I cried and I screamed and I reached for you.
And our mother--
she just stood there as fists came down
and my head hit the wall--
and my head hit the wall--
and you said,
Good-night. I love you.
We'd laugh later and compare scars,
our bruises symbols of brotherhood,
symbols of hatred for you.
So small, yet I remember washing the blood out of his white-blonde hair,
my fingers over his head--
like the time he cracked his own soft skull with a hammer.
We were always building things--
bridges, forts,
schemes of escape,
designs of death.
Sometimes I can still feel him inside me,
the soft whispering of my memory,
chewing on my bones,
drinking my blood,
sucking on my flesh.
He rattles my ribs and screams into my mouth
and he whispers,
Let me out.
We could never escape for more than a moment.
It was a new year--
so you'd sling us over your fat shoulder
as you spit up warm beer
and laugh at us as you hung us over the railing.
She'd still just stand there.
How many times had I hit my head?
How many times had I refused to eat for weeks,
and how many times had I stopped breathing?
It's almost as if I can't see myself
running away into the woods,
climbing that huge white tree
to the top of our fort,
kneeling in the cold,
pretending I could fold into myself
and I could love myself,
pretending I had grown wings
and I could fly away from it all.
When you realized that you couldn't breathe hatred into us,
you beat hatred onto us.
And eventually I stopped reaching my hands up to you.
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Christopher Lane Conley
Princeton Day School
And rain
and cry over my Grandmother's bed
holding a dead hand and not crying
but listening to my mother
and listening to my mother
mother and mother
"1920's Golden Girl" loved the ocean
and slept by the shore
watching clouds and that Aztec sky
because it reminded her of Grandad
whom she loved.
She gave me the ocean
and held me up over beaches and balconies
looking out to feel
and she watched me fall asleep
like I did when she did
"To wake up with silence or a lullaby
like my mother used to sing it," she'd say
"would almost make it all right."
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Christopher Lane Conley
Princeton Day School
Longing For a Different Birthday
Have you ever had one of those days
when all the questions stink so you
just move on and the day gets long
and sad and you wish you had just
faked the answers to the questions
before but you figure, "hey, there's
really no time like the present" and
all the people you see seem to be
so much more about what you're
trying to be about and you really
don't think there's a point to all that
life has become? don't you wish
things were like the fifties again
and you could go out to the roller
skating waitressed burgerbars to
get a chocolate malt and a side of
chilly cheesed french fries and when
the roller skating waitress comes out
with your food she could lean inside
the car with her mini-skirting long legs
and say, "hey charley, maybe we could
go to the movie house sometime and
catch a flick" and you could say, "well
sure peggy sue,, that sounds like a
swell night" and then you could turn
on the engine of your 1957 cherry-
blue chevy and it would say, "vroom!"?
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Emily Van Duyne
Atlantic City High School
Nightly I sang showtunes
in the cozy confines of my bedroom
read scripts to myself
and cried at the tragedies
that my weak soprano
could never accomplish-
I was doomed Anita
the sultry one,
with her slutty voice,
the one that purred and hissed
clicked her heels and tossed her tulle skirt.
I could not attain
the purity of a Maria
who sang on octave out of range,
who trilled duets with Tony
vowing eternal love,
who should have killed herself in the end-
But it was the '50's.
So I pursed my lips
and howled how
"A boy like that
He kill your brother"
with an accent somewhere between
Puerto Rico and South Jersey
and I muted my castanets
in fear of rousing the parents.
I knew I was good.
I heard the roar of crowds
in a packed house after "America"
as I stood behind the curtain to change sets
for the balcony scene,
knew I would make it,
so I told Daddy,
"I want to be an actress"
brazen, chest out, my freckle face upturned-
No, you don't. It's the worst profession in the world;"
which I might have bought,
but, he continued-
"For a woman." Return to Contents
Emily Van Duyne
Atlantic City High School
Putting Away the Groceries with Mother
Canned goods stacked
like aluminum castles in the sky
topple into the dark recesses of the cabinet
like children's building blocks-
but with a less satisfying crash.
Aluminum doesn't ping like it should
when it greets itself
but disappoints with a lackluster thud.
Bagged potatoes
remind me of myself
dangly in sweats and Adidas
in pursuit of a place to hide
from Mother's sigh.
"The cranberries have to be refrigerated,
they don't go in the cabinet.
For God's sake!"
A rush of hot carbon dioxide
flutters her bangs from her forehead,
reveals a lattice work of careful delicacy
around her eyes.
A half heart sorry
mutters from my lips
just soft enough for her clarion "What"
to re-sting my eardrums.
"I said, 'I'm sorry,' I didn't know."
On cue, I exit the kitchen
to escape the whistling kettle,
the furnace, mother.
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Jolia S. Einstein
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
Twenty six years after the screams,
I am not the Vietnamese children falling from the sky.
Slammed against our refrigerator door,
my neck in your grasp,
agony in your eyes.
Twenty six years after the screams,
I am not my mother who watches in silence.
Our screen door scrapes my back,
pinned down to the stairs,
your vodka breath in my face.
Twenty six years after the screams,
I am not your buddies, engraved on the wall.
I am a frightened boy with fragile wings,
and a big man on my back.
I am your son.
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Jolia S. Einstein
Hunterdon Central Regional High School
There is a boy I know who walks the long way home.
I make him smile.
I'm not used to that.
He tells me that symmetry is beauty and that I am beautiful,
then his glance shifts to just beyond my shoulder.
He made me an origami bird and I promised to keep it.
He taught me how to make the wings move by pulling the tail,
But it still won't fly.
He gave me a birthday card, inside a pressed flower,
each petal pink and perfect.
I think it means that he'd help me bury the bee
that I found upside down on the windowsill.
I'm not used to that either, I'm not used to any of this.
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Michael Essig
Randolph High School
Theres absolutely nothing
like bluegrass music
to accompany
loneliness.
Bluegrass music
in a small
room.
Thats not loneliness,
that becomes solace.
And I am set free to
bang my feet
and shake a leg
to the hip and hootin'
banjos.
Freedom is easy,
redemption is not even a
problem.
Sometimes I wish I
lived in the mountains,
I would drink from
Cripple Creek and
nurse
Drunken Hiccups.
River life. Free and easy.
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Michael Essig
Randolph High School
My days as a student
are not wasted.
I go to school
and study.
But I scrutinize the
legs of young
ladies instead
of the
subjects that
classroom
teachers reiterate
again and again.
I sit and stare
from behind a
small pile of papers at
the magnanimous
gifts some were given
at birth.
Some legs might be
dark or pale,
bare or affixed
with pantyhose.
I've made a
study of crosses.
The way great legs
are crossed.
My eyes move
like the rising sun,
trailing slowly, smoothly,
then setting.
So when teachers
spurt subjects they
think will enhance
my being,
my invariable interest
never loses focus.
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Greta Ge Gao
Middlesex County Arts High School
We can only speak
in metaphors, skirting its edges
carefully; we can only bring ourselves
to say that we have become
like fish, that our faces and hands
become thin and white, fin-like
that dry sobs escape like angry bubbles
from our throats, that we breathe
in and out shadows, with long intervals
in between, that our eyes stare icily
to the sides, unblinking, and we float
in our blue-green sorrows in a long
silent weep, even in sleep.
We can only bring ourselves
to embellish our scaly surfaces, to mouth
the useless things, but grief always waits
a few inches beneath the skin,
where we are silent, careful, afraid of touching
our slippery, cold insides.
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Greta Ge Gao
Middlesex County Art High School
It might have been the way
the florescent light sliced you apart
into hardened edges and planes
of uneven shadows, smudged lines
like creases of crumbled paper smoothed
but not smoothed enough;
it might have been the way the cold weather
chiseled extra layers into your grin,
folds of skins that hung lightly
from your yellow eyelids; it must have been
something, because tonight, Father,
you looked like an old man,
looked every bit of your forty-nine years
that congealed near your eyes, on your forehead,
under your quivering chin as you placed
carefully the fork in your mouth.
My breath caught in my throat the way wind
trapped in doorways; we cut our food
into geometric shapes like dividing the years
that were lost like sand in the porous sift of silence,
Father, waiting to be young again.
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Amanda Graham
Southern Regional High School
I want to write a sex poem,
the only hitch is...
I've never had sex-
no, never.
I am one card holding member of the, something like, 40% group of
ELITE
seventeen year old females who have refrained from sexual activity,
In other words, just in case you weren't listening,
Yes, I am.....Yes, I am a....
virgin.
I'm often told, "Write about what you know",
however, those so-called experts
those literary geniuses,
who throw the phrase around like birdseed, have tasted sex;
They have "material" to work with.
They toss around words like swelter, heaving, sucking....with passion,
and more importantly,
experience-behind them,
In front of them,
surrounding them like a hazy, lust-filled aura.
They have been given unlimited credit at Roget's.
They have permission to make your mouth, eyes, fingernails, water and swoon.
They can say, while thrusting their pelvises and voices,
"We made love, our bodies groaning, sticking, frustrated like too much Saran wrap
on a summer's day."
I could/would go on forever or
until I come across patches of not-so frozen language,
then I'd fall in,
but, I'd be a poser like every fat with a ph, cool with a k,
kid at school who ever "went alternative."
I have been given permission from the all powerful poetry people
to write soggy-sock, mush poems about.
flowers (opening like thick eyelashes, thin tentacles, twisting toward every drop of rain
at
the same time.),
colors (red is the wrinkle in a sunrise, red is my cheeks ready to scream, red is the
scream
leaving my cheeks.),
animals (Rocky Toto Fluffy Rex went bald one day, never was he the same.)
But I am forbidden from sex,
the same sex the moldy-faced cafeteria lady has,
the same sex every high hair on daytime talk shows has,
the same sex my mother and father....
Well, let's not dwell
Words are lingering on my tongue and ready to pounce.
I will be forced to spit, spit, spit them out like watermelon seeds.
Someday soon sex words will splurge from my pen like octopus ink and I will lather
myself with them until my urges to write a sex poem subside like a pregnant woman eating
pickles and caviar.
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Amanda Graham
Southern Regional High School
I have dyed my hair one million times, chameleon is my name,
chameleon in flux who never found the perfect color.
Instead concentrated on boys with accents, accented boys.
In the frat house down the street.
Staring deeply into the eyes of Superficial-
Mask Monster.
Caring about Colorado Primes' beckon to the eaters of blood meat.
Saying your Mom is coool, she got Sunny D.
After a hard days facade Miss Chameleon returns to her white eyelet church,
cable knit curtains, nasty tuna breath.
Dandelion feathers roar.
She will name her X-generation band Aphrodisiac.
...And the plot thickens, like cream of chicken soup.
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Alexandra Manya Greenberg
Middlesex County Arts High School
Mother, you
who stirs the steaming insides
of the baked potato
I made you for dinner
and proclaims, "I'm not hungry."
You who guzzles
white wine at the kitchen table
and wipes your red eyes while telling
me why you have to leave.
If I could reach over
my own picked-at plate of food, the drinks,
and cracking wood table between us,
to bury myself in your twig-like arms
and make myself small enough for you
to call your little girl again.
If I could give you a reason to stay,
and drag up that woman
who used to stroke my hair
and pull the sunlight in
through the rainbow curtains to wake me from my sleep
into each new day-
I would give up
these years I've spent growing into myself,
learning how to stroke my own hair,
unknowingly consuming these daily tasks
I never before realized
made you.
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Alexandra Manya Greenberg
Middlesex County Arts High School
Grandmother I fear I will forever dream you
looking asleep in your death bed, eyes
sewn shut with threads of mucus, mouth open
as if you were still breathing.
I watched you from the kitchen
as I once watched the killer
whales at Sea World, my eyes wide
as I gritted my teeth
to keep from showing that being so close
to their large bending bodies,
your frozen in-a-curl figure,
scared me.
When March is hardly here
and February still scolds me
with each frigid breath, I
seem to remember you clearest of all.
I cried in your lifeless bedroom
at the first New Jersey snow you missed
in ninety years, crawled across the floor space
where your bed once lay, as if I could find you
hidden in that carpet and you would tell me
it's alright that I never said goodbye
to that cold broken-down body of yours',
the one after hitting ninety
even you had no use for.
I search to set my sight free
from your disposable flesh
the blue skin and stiff wrinkled lips I'm afraid
have somehow stained the picture of you I hold,
smiling behind my eyes. Maybe
I will wake one day
and be able to see
you again, as I did for so many years simply
breathing. And I will forgive myself
for not trying to call you back
out of that flesh.
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Margaret Miller
Hopewell Valley Central High School
When you arrived, I had been waiting for weeks
for the berries in the yard
to ripen and spill their juice.
Even then, they stayed closed in furred green shells,
drinking the yellow light,
growing thick and sweet outside the house
until walking through the leaves
smeared my legs with their red honey.
A whole handful of them dissolved
in a single swallow. There were so many
that the ground throbbed with their color,
and each one was full enough
to fill the hollow of the tounge
and heavy enough to make the fingers feel swollen.
The delay prolonged the sweetness
of the fruit, the sun in the window,
the pulling out of everything ripe.
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Margaret Miller
Hopewell Valley Central High School
Naked, she stares at the mirror.
She can see everything
but her feet:
the arch of her calves,
the convex curve of her thighs
with her belly a round moon over them,
the dip of flesh at her chin,
and her wings too full along the span.
She lifts herself off the ground
(sees the plump toes,)
then turns sideways, breathing in.
Still, that stomach bulges
above the pelvis,
and her buttocks are planets
glowing palely
in the fluorescent lights.
She faces away,
carefully folds her wings behind her,
and vomits ambrosia and nectar.
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Julia Ruth Minsky
Dwight-Englewood School
I talked to you just yesterday,
but communicating was still like
trying to pull something unbroken out of a train wreck.
Here I am, buckled in frustration,
struggling to find the hidden intent
in your rubbish of useless words.
A friend of mine from Australia says
that back home they don't tolerate
vapid vernacular, so I make you
the Outback of my mind.
Sometimes in winter we lose ourselves;
we want to hibernate and
forget the probing, insulting bad days of life.
This is not your case.
You simply miss kissing someone
the way my sister in college misses good home cooked meals.
I wan to stir-fry you
with the bitterness and naked humiliation
of rejection, then catch the next train
out of you. My fingers are like
ten separate viruses,
infecting everything I touch these days.
Traveling back, the revenge is a smoldering brick,
ready to crack the shit out of
every window in your dream house.
Should I ever meet the Elizabethans,
I would warn Juliet that all love is this:
getting burned by the same fire
which once warmed you.
Just one more go around, she'd tell me,
only this time make it Real.
A heart like mine ripped from your train wreck
is dying by the second, in critical condition
in the ICU. Will you go to see it?
Bring it flowers? Kiss its whiptorn sinews?
Tell your lies to me and I will lay my head upon them.
The heart is just a big, involuntary muscle.
Later, tonight, my sister calls from Washington,
and tells me to stop falling in love.
Mine is an act of simply falling,
I tell her,
and has nothing to do with love.
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Julia Ruth Minsky
Dwight-Englewood School
Once I ran,
hot-blooded, fevered, tan, spindly legs,
sticky popsicled hands,
And my brand new stars and stripes dress,
through the thick streets.
The fireworks, boat-slip, drag-queens, stumbled walk,
cooking linguica, and the hum of the T.V.'s
inside each glowing house,
with shouts of the big game
swimming by.
The crowds, like protestors on Washington,
like kids to the last lick of batter,
like lions to the kill,
swept me up
and buried
me
away.
All night while the fireworks screamed above the harbor,
I crawled through the crippled streets,
searching each empty alley
for familiarity.
Midnight would come,
would find me suffocated in my father's scoured apron.
He, home from the restaurant,
smelling of Linguini Alfredo and Involtini,
and I, lost again in the folds of gingham,
with his hot palm
pressed against my sweaty back.
And outside,
Red banners, loose shoes, ashing Reds, burning charcoal,
the elegant transsexuals, the fat, camera wielding
tourists, the pot-smoking high-schoolers, the dirty
children, a squid fisherman, a foul smelling dock,
a poster, a parliament, a picture, a posse,
an oyster, an outhouse, an open fortune
Teller, a t-shirt sale, a tamborine
player, two lesbians and their
pitbull, and the raging
fireworks hung from the
silent tees
like omens.
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M. Curran Nachbar
Hopewell Valley Central High School
| There's a quark in the bottom of the sea, a curl in a quark and a quark in me Me, singing me singing quark singing sea! one quark zang into another Bing bang, who was your mother, brother, who flared you forth into a probability of existence? Child, you've been here a while, what's four years of your body what's four billion of the cell Are we just counting down? promise you, no levitation at the end. Miriam tells a story in bell tones and great hwooshes from under the table it rises and falls, dropping perfect pennies, one by one, onto my open eyes dissolving downward and pooling just beyond my ears. Later, layer between fitted and flat sheets this cool marble slab, punctuated by birthmark, belly button, budding breasts breathes deep in sleep and knows the story slides through its veins. A few billion billion moments later- that is to say, not very many years- clenched teeth cut on pennies deny, defy toothpaste smiles and placated palates. red half-moons appear, angry and helpless, four bleeding across each palm. The bruising little curves wax and wane. They never set. Miriam's wet lashes somehow grew around these new eyes. Their taste of copper is for MADNESS. |
Too late at night, beams the electric light bathing a sea of condemned paper that threatens to drown me. Under no circumstances will I end my padding! Do come in, the water's fine, so many voices cried, and not being one for hanging back, I stripped and walked cleanly into the waves. But the tow is strong, and I've swallowed too much seawater to cosy into a burrow, miles inland, any more. |
M. Curran Nachbar
Hopewell Valley Central High School
I know you sang the seven suns round the day,
spun veins from twilight air between your fingers,
sweated unintelligible speech during the darkest of
suffocating nights.
You told me your other name,
the one running endlessly among the
willow roots and fallen leaves,
and it cleaved directly to my temple.
(Forgive me for mispronouncing it sometimes.)
I combed the crimson through your hair
and never winced when it singed my fingers.
I want.
So why is it that to trace your character in the grass
is to wait on the brink of
and desolation?
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Nicole Ramos
Middlesex County Arts High School
Hordes of hijas y hijos
mob me like mice
around a pied piper, my american
voice so similar to the fabled song
of his enticing flute.
The children shake beneath
their straw sombreros, waving whisker
thin limbs with first-
fulls of gum 5˘, red
braid bracelets, and Suerte
cigarettes.
They'll sell their smiles
para mi, "la senorita bonita", for the warmth
of silver spent from the pockets
of my patched dress. The loaf
of bread it'll buy them
might fill their hungry
beds. But their eyes, empty
bulging mice eyes, black
like the downward descent
of a peso on a dry well,
never look full. Even after
I've emptied every pocket
of myself.
And there is you, an old
lover among the beggars,
pleading with the same
starving stare. Selling
yourself for the solace
of my small breasts, the comfort
in the cracking curvature
of my back, the words riding
the tongue at rest under
the moist roof of my mouth.
The children always leave
me, never empty handed, grateful
for their tin beggars cups
now clinking with the sparse music
of coins. But for you,
you who begs for more, I ask this-
will you leave if I can give
only my hand, empty,
except when filled
with the worth of yours. Return to Contents
Nicole Ramos
Middlesex County Arts High School
We open each month
like opium poppies
in vermillion bloom, and tread
through our tender blood fields
like an ancient tribe, charting the cycle
of each new moon.
A kinship alien to men
They have feared the steaming
garnet star burning its path
down the Orion's belt
of women's bodies, and the thick
musk scent clinging softly
like dusk, rustling
through prehistoric red ferns.
But men have seen our blood-
shed as a battle cry. They crave
the power to hold a life
(as only women's wombs can) and grasp
it like a long stemmed glass
of red wine. They want the choice
to crush the crystal
with a kiss, or caress its lip
with jealous fists.
Some men have crooned
and cradled us, like beaten casualties
of war, our bodies limp and heavy
in their anxious arms.
They've whispered through stray
tendrils of hair their wish
to touch and tap into our tenderness
like sapling stems gently dipping
into a river.
While other men have fervently plunged
their sex like steel swords
of Spanish matadors, brilliantly
braving a beast in embroidered
grandeur. Then excitedly pulling
themselves out, blood glistening
on them like that on the mirrored edge
of a blade, pulling triumphantly
from the hunched back meat
of a conquered bull.
Return to Contents
Jana Ryan
Monsignor Donovan High School
This and that
And all its inconstancies
Why?
Right down this
Long road
Once so straight--
And now all so wrong.
I promise myself
All of nothing--
And end up with that exactly.
Yeah--
Who knows anymore?
Or where it goes anymore?
Not I, or me.
He stood before that platform
Of structure,
Words wound so tight.
Me hanging on each and every.
A person to control
My days, and future--days.
Always there.
Where goes that way once shown?
Return to Contents
Jana Ryan
Monsignor Donovan High School
Lie on bed with drug ridden boy,
And like it.
Oh, I know it is over--
But just the tempting
Temptations--of it all.
To go where never gone.
Yeah--life.
Break the standards, please.
Return to Contents
Zack Schwartz
Princeton Day School
Nothing You do Right Now Matters
I was raised up on Bruce Springsteen songs
I came from a line of salesmen my first
kiss happened out behind the gymnasium after
nothing else mattered-
but no, that's not true. I came from
a line of salesmen
who didn't know it. My father tried to bleach
his Brooklyn nose, and my first kiss
hasn't even happened yet, but it's true yes,
nothing does matter now,
it's true.
Oh, when can I live in folksongs? When
can I sell my birthright for a cup of
black coffee?
Now I am excavating a future. There is not much
that stands out, and it is
the same things every time: Light
and darkness, movement and stillness,
warmth and cold. Cities. I want
my life
to be opened-up. Oh, when will the empty houses
pour in like broken glass? When will things touch me
until I die?
My father is selling me a future. I
am buying back my eyes
for moments. No. I am buying back
my whole body. One whole body
for two dead eyes.
Sometimes now the days are so bright
I am numb to them in waking.
Hey, bright days, Brooklyn Bridge-
where you headed? Bruce Springsteen-
where you gone?
The days go by in stereo. He is selling
his past for futures. His gold watch
is not what you think it is, and it's true
nothing I do right now matters.
Return to Contents
Zack Schwartz
Princeton Day School
Prose Elegy For My Missing Pieces
Whoever you are, you're going to be happy. Take
him. Take her. Whoever you are, you will
float in chartered dreams, and you have my
missing pieces. Not that I wan them back.
I want you back, like they say in the pop songs,
but it is all the same, the you I never had,
the pieces I never had. You would get tired
of things too, believe me. One night, I almost
took pills-aspirin, because it would be the everyday
things that killed me. I stayed up until two AM,
pacing. I stared out my window, wishing her face
to appear like ripples. But it was air, not water,
I stared in. Take him, I said to her the next morning,
sitting outside, this could hurt us all. But my withdrawal
was stifled. She smiled. I don't know what to do about you,
I went on. I have dreamed of you for months now, without
knowing it. I said, I wanted to dive into you. Like water.
Like nothing but water.
Return to Contents
Kevin Sintumuang
Edison High School
Italian Rivers and Alaskan Skies
Flashes of the Mediterranean
from a tunnel dug
out of clay.
The seaward,
westward wind that
makes it way
through
and across
the mountain unto the
other side shall
move the sand and
cover the green
the green, green palms
of gardeners turning
their land into
deserts of the ocean.
Bag filled with water
are seen on the streets, rolling
past gutters as they make their way to
glaciers of the North.
Whales begin their tumulting
in the metal sea.
The ocean splashes,
mist fills the air,
fills the iron lungs as the
river seeks to
spread,
to widen,
to destroy itself
into canyons
Into canyons of
dust and of
clay
Return to Contents
Kevin Sintumuang
Edison High School
Eighteen days is a long time
to be alone on a ship,
to be alone on a ship for
eighteen days is a long time.
As it goes...
Eighteen days to eighteen
men are eighteen ships
in eighteen
ancient seas.
The sea urchin shall find
his way on shore,
leaving scratches encrusted in the sand.
The marks will be removed
as high tide comes in low
tide goes out.
Men with binoculars search
the shores with combs from
catacombs of graves from
distant lands.
A robbery has taken place, but
science has coiled in its
spring, celephane wrapped
sweets for the peasents.
They jump, they jump.
"There, there,"
to the left, to the right,
limbs fly through the air.
The satisfaction of empty porcelain bowls
and chrome trinket fill the air like
high ceilings, blue in their time.
Reduction, precussion,
Nightfall comes as
the drum, a moon,
a cat, a pot, a
moose.
The moose. Return to Contents
Tonia Stevenson
Atlantic City High School
a pot of green peas
side by side
on a stove
of fire
hot
like the sun
of a summer day
crackles
from the water
as it dissolves
into a mist
of stream
Return to Contents
Tonia Stevenson
Atlantic City High School
water drips
from a faucet
onto spaghetti stained
dishes
liquor bottle tops
lie on the
splintered
wooden floor
ashtrays full
with cigarette butts
mice rest
in the cushions
of the sofa bed
and in the
dark bedroom
up the stairs
by the washroom
a pale body
lay stiff and cold
and my brother
with a smile
on his face
and blood
on his hand
Return to Contents
Shannon Stroever
Middletown High School
He sent me a photograph of a catfish gasping through
a pile of rose petals- supposedly to represent his struggle for life minus me- and then
called me up, to give me the opportunity to beg him back into my realm and right before I
hung up, I told him only a sadist would do that to a poor, defenseless fish.
Return to Contents
Shannon Stroever
Middletown High School
Gonna seduce him over the hard rolls Gonna convince
him to como on out post that counter Gonna get that bakery boy if I only knew his
name.
Return to Contents
Andrew Yang
Christian Brothers Academy
I opened my curtains today
For the first time since summer.
Saw snow collect on the tempered eaves
outside my window
They fell like earth crumbling away.
Watched wind blow the fallen flakes upward
Come at me in the window,
Then fall back onto the cold hard ground,
It has coated the sides of thinly branched trees
like a thick blanket of fur.
They have mired the streets in melted snow,
and covered the warm asphalt, like skim milk.
The sky is white.
White, like the beds of grass and lawns,
and these white plaster walls,
dry as my mother's hands.
I am not surprised;
It has snowed all year in these rooms.
Return to Contents
Andrew Yang
Christian Brothers Academy
When you were a child,
Did you ever
Sleep in your parents´ bed
when they weren't there?
Perhaps the bed
You used to sleep on with them,
for consolations after nightmares.
I know a girl
Who likes sleeping in her parents' bed when they're away.
It's big and four-posted,
With soft, frosty white sheets and covers of goose down
Like cold vanilla ice cream.
And even in the empty house,
She sneaks into their room,
Discreet
In her loose pajamas,
And slips underneath, feeling frosty white
Slips off her slippers with the shuffling of impeccable feet.
She sleeps better,
Better than if there were rain outside her window
For tonight she doesn't cry for her mother.
Curled-up in bundles of blankets between her knees,
A small baby in the middle of a large sea.
Return to Contents