Read Select Poems From H Period Symposium Class Students That Imitate the Style of Tracy K. Smith!

 

Night Letters: Inspired by Tracy K. Smith's Night Letters

by Emma Levinbook

        Monday 

I turn to feel the heat of your breath

Grazing my neck.

Its steadiness, its gentle gust

Alive like a flickering flame 

Immune to the wind.

I reach out for you,

For the sharp touch of your shoulder blades,

Hoping to be illuminated 

By the spark that came alive when we first met

And lured me to you

Every late-night drive through the solitary streets of your hometown,

Every Sunday afternoon in the park with your fingers intertwined with mine,

Every coffee cup at the crack of dawn as I begged you to hold me for one minute longer.

I search for the weight of your body,

Expecting it to be tucked next to mine.

For the curve of my hips 

To fit into the space the edges of your frame create,

As if I were the missing corner piece of your body’s intricate puzzle,

As if God designed us high in the clouds

And gently placed us back into Earth’s sanctuary,

Surrounded by the gleaming gold of buttercups,

Telling us to never let go.

Where are you?

I struggle to close the distance 

Between myself and what once was.

I force my mind to move your hand onto my skin.

I beg your fingers for warmth.

I call out to the sheep that you count in your dreams,

Asking them to return you to me.

But a startling silence fills the room.

It pierces and stings

And suddenly I’m stuck.

The sheets close in on me, 

Holding me down,

Grinning at me as if to prove that they were right,

That I should’ve listened 

As they wrinkled and folded and tore at your slightest touch.

I feel a startling chill in my blood.

It’s a hunger that courses through my veins,

A hunger that is bitter.

Bitter that you left me with my hollow heart,

With tears flooding the cloth of my pillow,

With an emptiness so full.

The anesthesia of false hope that you will return wears off,

And I’m left alone 

With just my thoughts.

The thought of you.

The thought of us.

A distant memory.

Wednesday

Each night I find myself lying hopelessly next to your shadow,

The indent of your lost body

Marked within the foam of my mattress

To remind me of what I once had.

I wonder if you think about me 

The way that I think about you,

Arms pointed up to the sky

As if to summon a connection,

To close the gaping, wide gap that separates us,

To remind yourself of what it feels like to long for the presence of another 

Like I always did,

Even when your body was next to mine.

Outside of the constraining confines of my bare bedroom walls

And beyond the wintry window frames,

The night’s silence is haunting.

The luminous light from the streetlamps fills with a yellow hue the emptiness of my room 

Exposing the fatigue that swallows my face

And the swelling from the puddles of my tears.

Then I hear a voice similar to yours,

Raised up like the wings of a bird preparing for flight.

Its deep tenderness has a way of lighting a fuse in the deepest corners of my soul,

As if it knows that I want to once again feel free and unbound and liberated

From the chokehold you have on my heart.

But still, I listen for your soft footsteps on the patio,

For the gentle wind of your breath on my back,

For the delicate touch of your lips on mine.

Yet I know that you’re millions of miles away,

Turning with the Earth as it revolves around its axis.

I try to move with you, around you, within you,

But I stand frozen in time,

Unable to detach myself from the glue that sticks me into place.

All I have is the part of you that grows inside of me,

The memory of when you first laid your eyes on mine.

        Saturday

I long for the moments 

Before we collided 

When being alone was a choice

Instead of a symptom

Of a broken heart.

I wish the days drifted by 

Like the swift gliding of a sailboat along the smooth sea waters

Instead of laying languidly across my lap,

Locking my limp legs into place like an anchor,

Preventing me from observing the subtleties 

That a life without love claimed to offer.

Sometimes I thank the days for fastening me in place 

With no responsibilities

Or a sense of urgency.

But other times the confinement infests me,

Seeps through my toes, my knees, my elbows,

Blocks the air from flowing through my lungs.

The days throw me around 

Like I’m a disturbing show-and-tell project

Being tossed between sticky first-grade fingers,

Inviting judgement and glares and opinions.

It’s as though the shattering of my heart

Led to the disintegration of my being

And turned me paper thin.

But hidden within the cracks,

A little piece of you lies.

I don’t dare open the door that leads me to you

No matter how much my heart begs,

Because my mind reminds me that you didn’t wake me that day for a reason,

That the words you spoke 

Were cold with manipulation and false promises,

That what we shared

Was just a fantasy,

And that I lost every part of myself 

So that I could love you.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Waiting for Autumn

by Samuel Merkatz

Summer skies are laden with moisture,

Grey and heavy

Until perspiration boils up on our skin.

We clamp our hands

And slap the back of our necks

Like dancers but we're just trying

To kill the striped flies that drink from us.

Folding magazines we fan ourselves.

Sucking on ice cubes when we empty

Our fast food paper cups

At the gas station,

We open refrigerator doors

Pressing cans of soda

To our foreheads.

August is humid

Only broken by the cannonade

Of thunderstorms. We are all

Waiting for autumn.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Star

by Stella Risinger

I am curled up in the passenger seat,

Cocooned in the chill

of nighttime in summer.

Laying on my side, my knees to my chest,

Shoulders hunched forward.

My body creeks, being put to sleep

Swaying like the rocking of a sailboat.

We are going to my mother’s favorite place

She and my family already there.

My father is driving with me,

Nursing his coffee, listening to the radio.

Quietly, though, considering me,

I am being put to sleep. 

His hair is silver. His back is hunching. 

I can see the cogs of his mind turning

Always churning, always brilliant

Never slowing, always pulsing. 

Earlier, we had talked

About the stars, skies, and everything I know so little about.

And I wonder if he is thinking 

About if he had been an astronomer instead. 

The stars fascinate him

He waves his arms, strains his throat. His eyes light up. 

A child reaches for their mobile. 

My mobile had lambs and stars and moons painted yellow

And his eyes are full of knowledge and graphs.

He loves math. 

And everything I struggle so much to grasp.

I cannot begin to understand his mind. 

And people say I will be just like him?

It must take time, it must take something.

I want to stretch my legs,

Open my little box,

And roll the crick out of my neck.

But I can’t yet,

We aren’t nearly there.

He cannot see the stars tonight,

And sometimes I forget that they are even there.

He says if he were not a doctor,

He would have been an astronomer.

But he is happy. 

Happy with the life he knows,

Keeping his eyes on the road, and not up at the stars. 

My mobile dangled stars before my eyes. 

My name means star.

And I am curled up in the passenger seat.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

by Naomi Wong

I.

You are my biology,

(not were) 

our roots.

Without you, I am nothing, 

I am unknown, 

(Could I say I am? 

I would not be.) 

infinitesimal 

and soaring,

unidentified,

uninterrupted in the sweeping,

forever expanding cosmos.  

or maybe I have been reincarnated? 

As I know that you have. 

II. 

You have been reborn in 

uncountable forms,

into my spirit 

my confidence. 

Into the voice in my head 

that speaks the language of love.  

That thing, it shifts my gaze from one of criticism 

to one of warmth,

of tenderness 

when I look in the mirror. 

You live now in echo of my brother’s sneeze,

in the bumps spread on my skin

like strawberry seeds.