Poetry Submissions: Ether, Hollow, Unable to Tell You, Cryptomnesia

Ether
Alyssa Rieper 
Undergraduate/Art Education 

The faint fire is weaker today

And the color of flowers have faded to gray

The details in brushstrokes have mingled in pen

Ether has coursed through the veins of our kin

Watch the waking while asleep in the brush

Handprints tell stories when lips have paused hushed

Just figure mine in and finish your plan

With lines like labyrinths laced in my hand

Hollow

Evan Gillick

Undergraduate/Spanish

Losing one's mind in the search to find oneself,
finding only an empty shelf
upon which fragments of a shattered age
were once held together in a mosaic of life.
The tiles, strewn on the floor
like marbles or a game of jacks
only serve to dichotomize
the duality of present and past.
The stitches of the grand tapestry
become unseamed having been deemed
incapable of holding this world together.

A child kneels on the floor
his toy truck in hand,
not steering, merely staring
at the wood beneath his knees.
No one knows what he sees.
The toys on the floor gather dust
as if unattended for generations,
now only a symbol of what he lost
upon acquiring illumination.
A chill breeze shuffles through the open window
knocking something down with a crash,
yet the boy moves not one lash
of his eyes so transfixed on the floor.

His youth lost, his innocence faded,
with the realization that Daddy's not coming home.
The teddy bear in the corner
has arms open in a perpetual embrace,
but no item on earth could replace
the wonderful world he's missing.
It's not what he sees, but what he doesn't,
that creates his icy stare.
The magic is gone, and so he looks on
for what is no longer there.

Unable to Tell You

Emily Diehl

Undergraduate/Print Journalism

Change has begun to hit me with a torturous sting,
You were there when I crumbled four years straight
I was almost a corpse, and to you, probably a huge weight,
When we hung out, the swim team was our fling.

Now, pacing, what will this friendship bring?
like an introduction and an innocent smile, it’s a clean slate
wiped from us, there’s nothing we share, and this I hate,  
like a constant fly’s buzz, a woundless doubt begins to spring;

all we have created is now ash, I carry it in my vase,
the bond of trust huddles and is being caught,
nothing you did, could’ve ceased my turn,

you were once my fence, now you are a former place
the memories dwindle, and a reason can’t be bought
I’m sorry, but I’m afraid this friendship has begun to burn.

Cryptomnesia

Daniel Saffert

Undergraduate/English Literature

what is the inherent rebellion of this
that whets my panting, vernal cynicism?
what festering compulsion in my brain forces me
to hemorrhage and cough up these golems,
the cauterized chimeras of everyday futility?
 
since first (ph)ones formed there was this,
the thirst that must be quenched, which is the
non-fatal malady of thought, babbling, torrenting.
a proclivity whose din deafens external mumblings
and constrains a purging, lest floods form
 
happiness then, thy means are incisional in origin
lobes of exclamations cut and left to some
other for whom the burden may reside
and further be diluted by absorbative patterns
shifting like skiffs before the impending flat lines