Delivery
Zoe Goldstein
Third-year, English
Her lips, dry, taste like
Mexican rattlesnake hide.
She left her extra
Skin. In a mailbox, hidden,
On an empty beach.
The package was marked in blood,
“Return to sender.”
And, attached, a postcard to
A fossilized shark,
Whose teeth she still finds washed up
In her kitchen sink.
She visits fairly often –
Not to check the mail –
She likes to watch the ocean
Exhale. In tide pools,
The sea urchins remind her
Of geisha slippers.
Leaving
Justin Kinnear
Fourth-year, English
Her blackened blue eyes follow
the falling westward sun – all efflux
dried out – with bloodstained words
caught in her throat, she considers
her breathing and leaving for the blue-
gray Pacific where waves ebb, flow: hope,
despair, hope, despair. With breakneck
January winds and marked city streets,
strewn palm fronds undone
like lost angels, Los Angeles is hell
on earth but good heavens! never looked
better. Returning to you. Smelling salt
so close like dried tears on a face, she
smiles and sighs through her bloody lip.
Terrains
Gabriel Malikian
Alumnus, English
Silver City: I sift through
saved stills under my solo shelter
pitched between a bleached steeple
and the ghosted homes of old
Idaho’s gone gold rush – here’s
us: dust-bathed urchins
blocking Yucca Valley’s rubble and bokeh
background, shoulder straps slung
over our torsos in khaki crosses, matching
cocked hips, ripped hems, and
raccooned eyes focused on slowing
the sunset: this makes magic light.
That promised-next pit stop
never came. Our abandoned
hospital honeymoon, Chernobyl,
expired.