Teen Writing

The garage smelled of hot cedar and motor oil, heavy as a held breath. You were always there first: cross-legged on concrete, setting up the chessboard before I reached the driveway. I learned to play here, cicadas buzzing, my hand on the knight’s ridged head, the same grooves chipping my tooth when I flung it too high, trying to make you laugh. We could barely understand each other—your drawn-out Southern vowels, my clipped Mandarin consonants slipping between us. This was o

A red-eyed east now. I rend dreams of myself, chewing through their paper walls, my face is ceded in beautiful slivers. This silver-bellied plane, a wound I don’t rouse. I wake with the ache still in me, cabin lights flaring, cold dawn slinking down my throat. The day presses close: I move through and my chest is a room I keep trying to unlock, the door swollen and my hands already raw. Somewhere inside, a small animal waits, breathing in the dark. It cages in the shudder of

In a strange city, I’m given the news under the airport’s salt-white lights. The departures change above me: Newark, Denver. While a voice calls final boarding, I turn the words stupid in my mouth: Dingus David, Dead Dave, David dead. Grief conjugates in me in irregular infinities: a hallway at night, a wet match, the dead batteries we keep. Everywhere, the world rehearses disaster: the red EXIT burning above a door, the oxygen masks sleeping in the ceiling, sirens stitching

Anagram Poetry is a series we’ll be doing where an author contributes one poem, then re-transfigures it to create a second poem. At the Laundromat The washing machine turns my red sweater inside out. A quarter rolls beneath the chair where a woman sleeps, her yellow coat folded over her knees. Outside, rain gathers in the gutter. The fluorescent light flickers against the glass, and a small moth beats its wings above the empty change machine. Someone has left a sock on the

My mother cuts a peach over the sink, turning the knife against the pit until the flesh comes loose in pieces. Outside, the sprinkler ticks across the neighbor's lawn and turns the afternoon briefly silver. She gives me the better half, the one without the bruise, and stands there eating hers over the open drain. I am seventeen and cannot remember the last time I let her feed me anything. The juice runs down my wrist, gathers in the small crease of my elbow. She reaches for a

By the time the fire alarm went off, we had already spent forty minutes pretending to understand derivatives, and everyone seemed relieved to have something we could agree on. Outside, the football field was still wet from the morning rain, and the girls in front of me were discussing a breakup that had apparently happened over lunch, though nobody could agree on who had ended it. I stood beside a boy I'd known since seventh grade who was showing me a picture of the car he pl

With lines from “A true account of the 1958 Yellow River flood” Heavy rain. On the last day of the year, loudspeakers coughing production quotas into the dark, we climbed to midnight with the wounds in your chest, shucking skin from skin in licks of devil- fingered ink. Yellow River pressing loess into its mouth. Rungs of the past, clinging in every which way—the dike ladders slick with silt, mud-brick villages crouched under a sky of iron filings. Movement in service of move

Artwork by Gauri Sharma Before I turned 16, before I stopped dating, whenever I would talk to a guy, their friends would warn them that I’m “everyone's girl”. When you date so many people you start taking the endings less seriously. To most people, having an ex in their class is a big deal, one that they get jitters over, but to me it's a common theme recurring in every single class. I have so many exes, they're all around me, I don't even notice them. Sometimes I forget we