Jinyoung Chloe Park is a high school student attending a school in Boston, Massachusetts. With an unwavering passion for art, she is diligently curating her art portfolio. Beyond her artistic endeavors, Jinyoung finds joy in creating handcrafted objects and expressing herself through K-pop dancing.

Yoonji Huh is a dedicated student enrolled at a school in Seoul, South Korea. With a strong passion for the arts, Yoonji is diligently curating her art portfolio in preparation for university. 

Summer

The glass leaves a wet ring,
 the table stains darker, holds it.

Grass burns under soles,
the porch boards remember the 

shade.

Laughter spits from the shallow end,
somewhere, a rope groans 

alone.

Smoke from the grill sticks to shirts,
ice from the cooler bites through knuckles.

Boards creak after the bodies leave,
the hammock still rocks without weight.

Some things burn loud enough to echo,
some cool slow enough to forget.

And still,
both leave marks.

Across the dark canvas

The cracked lens seizes the sun,  

Shards of light slices through the 

dust–

Stretches long on the rippling dune, 

Feet sink in the dry grit, 

A crease in fabric flutters against the heat, 

Figures stand on the 

edge–

Softened by a 

gust– 

Scatters the

pebbles–

Spiraling towards the shadow of our feet, 

The sun lowers behind the barren, 

Orange light glows..

Shadows sink beneath the ground,

The night falls cool and heavy, 

A brute curled tight, 

Patterns darken on skin, 

Lines winding like rivers, 

Drying in the fading light, 

Faint sparks of cold fire

scattered–

Across the dark canvas,

Blending into the night

This Old House

Worn smooth beneath every step,
splintered in places where shoes have slid.
It absorbs spilled sauces and dropped rice grains,
the heavy shuffle of customers coming and going.
It holds echoes of whispered deals and laughter,
silent but alive beneath each scuff.

Frame bent from years of use,
legs uneven, scraping the floor.
Its seat sags just enough to feel familiar,
cracked leather peeling like old skin.
It’s been leaned on, kicked, ignored,
but it stays, stubborn as the walls.

Hanging over the kitchen entrance,
threadbare and soaked with steam and grease.
Its edges fray like forgotten memories,
blocking the world beyond with a soft, heavy hush.
It moves only when the cooks pass through,
bearing the smell of garlic and smoke.

JK Kim is an ambitious student at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, VA. His interests lie in creative writing, particularly in short stories and poetry. During his free time, he enjoys playing golf and pursuing photography as a means of expression and inspiration.

Snack

It’s dark out 

It’s cold out 

Any moment now the sun might come out 

But i can still hear the sounds of people moving

The sound of people struggling 

The sound of people trying their best to live in this harsh society

I thought i wasn’t getting much sleep these days 

These people don’t sleep at all

I lay in my bed

My body devoured 

I lay there staring up in the ceiling 

I think to myself 

It must be freezing cold outside

How can those people have the motivation to go out at this time

I feel a chill down my spine 

Somethings not right but i don’t know what

I think eating a snack would solve the problem

I stand up and go look for some food

I sit down with all the food i scavenged 

A tuna can, some leftover chicken and some ramen

Todays hunt was successful i thought 

I will make it my mission to finish this as fast as i can

I dig in quickly 

I eat til there is nothing left 

except the last chicken leg 

After this i can finally go to bed with a full stomach 

I pick it up 

And I..

Beep beep beep…

wake up 

Injury to insult

The only time i insult someone is when 

I get insulted that’s why you should 

Add injury to an insult

You have to stand up for yourself 

When you insult them

Make sure to injure them as well

And don’t just minorly injure them

Permanently damage them

So they don’t have to come to school 

So that they don’t have to all this nasty homework 

I wish I don’t have to come to school anyways

I’m not sure about you

But personally i was taught to never take any disrespect from anyone 

Me personally i would have to add injury to insult

School 

I wish that it ended. She keeps talking and talking. I’m not listening, who is? Nobody listening there, all sleeping. School is such a waste. 

I wish that time stopped. I never thought it was fun. Schools should host more parties. We stayed there until 9. It ended in a flash.

I wish that he didn’t. Throwing that beautiful ramen away. I’m inside the school starving. While he wastes that ramen. My poor beautiful delicious ramen.

Andrew Ban is a student attending an International School in South Korea. He loves writing in his free time, and his other hobbies include cross country and bike riding. He was recently published in Inlandia: A Literary Journal, Dunes Review, The Elevation Review,  Rigorous and Mortal Magazine.

Pinpointing Me

1

The rainbow, in the gray. Just outside my grandmother’s house, a double rainbow formed. A little glimpse of color, nothing artificial. The first blossom of an idea.

2

A soft blanket, a touch of home when I was away. Carrying the promise of a quiet, dark room, and a time to dream. Fall into another world.

3

The library. A palace of stories. Unwavering bliss in the embrace of a book.

4

Graphite and crayons sculpting a gateway to another realm, limited only by hands and imagination. The mind moving fingers across paper, no finish line in sight.

5

Little alphabets that hang on walls, begging to be admired. Offering escape, if you can understand. Messages that few could read, but the code was clear to me.

6

Aisles of stories, too many to pick. The bag on my shoulder too heavy for a child, continually filled. Wanting for more of the neverending piles of possibility.

7

A light purple chair with white polka dots offered rest. Space to run to the worlds carried in my hands. A million truths beneath manicured covers.

8

Sharpies that wrote my name across my books. Something that I owned. Something that was mine. Claiming it. Staking the territory that I had worked so hard to earn.

9

The American Flag, a chance to be seen. To share my words. To show who I am. The moment that I realized I would need to work harder. The insignificant moment to my classmates, a defining one to me.

10

My stories that never left. Reshaped and revitalized, again and again. Following me through my journey. Seeing what I’ve become now, versus what I was then. Me.

Reagan Shin is a writer and rising senior attending high school in Virginia. She is currently assembling her portfolio for university and enjoys writing prose and short fiction in quiet corners of libraries and cafés.

Kill Me!

    He hung upside down on an aluminum frame bed, my friend Victor at the Austin Seton Hospital. Sores covered his body. The nylon straps that held him in place didn’t touch many sores and were supposed to make it possible for most to heal. Victor was on morphine drip for the pain.

     The man had grown up in a poor aristocratic family in Mexico. His father had a small hacienda that he sold soon after Victor grew up. Victor figured America might be a better place for a man that loved the study of philosophy. He drove a taxi in Austin for Roy’s, but spent the majority of his hours at the philosophy table in the UT Student Union arguing existentialism and the absurdity of life. Victor carried worn and fat Spanish translation of Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. He had a rubber band around it to hold the book together.

     My former wife Brenda kindly provided him a room to live so he could get his act together, but after a year she told him he’d need to leave. He ended up living in a tiny one room place in Clarksville neighborhood and that’s where the sores developed. He was not taking his insulin for his diabetes, not bathing, and not eating much. Victor ignored the sores and never went to the doctor.

      Victor was tall, thin, bearded and neurotic like I was. We both looked like we stepped out of a Woody Allen movie. 

      So now Victor was hanging upside down at Seton Hospital. I had come to see if I might help. I sat in a low chair next to his bed, bent over, my head turned up as much as possible to see and talk with him. It was not a position I could maintain. I saw in his face the befuddlement and despair, now much worse because of the pain.    

      Victor had been married to a hippie American woman who had renamed herself Miracle. I met her once. She was trying to make a living growing and selling wheat grass. For a short while wheat grass was the miracle food to save the planet. They had a daughter named Star who lived with Victor and was tall and blonde like her mother. Star tried once to get me to write a high school essay she needed to turn in the next day. His former wife had more difficulty surviving than Victor. She had transferred daughter Star and son Daniel over to him to bring up.

       A year ago the daughter had gone on her first date. The boy took her for a ride through the lovely Texas hill country. The car did not complete a turn and went off a high hill into a deep valley.

      Both these beautiful seventeen-year-old children died. I remember Star’s funeral under a canopy in the September heat in a Round Rock cemetery. It was called a celebration of life.

      The son Daniel was too broken up to come to his sister’s funeral. The boy was just a sophomore but a star player on the Austin High’s soccer team. The father had found the Clarksville apartment so his son could go to the best public high school in town. How they all fitted into that one room apartment I can’t imagine.

         Victor looked down at me as I tried to look up at him. For a long while he did not speak, then he said quietly, “Kill me.”

          I jumped up from the chair I sat on and moved toward the door. The words struck deep. To lose a child was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. Victor’s chances of surviving I’d been told were poor. I wanted to help. We had spent a lot of time talking together down at my bookstore. I knew he was poor and didn’t mind that he never bought anything. Sometimes he’d bring me a cup of coffee. This was around 1982 when downtown Austin was being torn up.  Sidewalks were widened, parking spaces were decreased, and trees were being planted along Congress Avenue. Flagstones were replacing the old sidewalk concrete. Changes were in the air. The Austin I knew and loved was beginning to become something else, a place not for intellectuals like Victor and I, a computer place that would soon be full of libertarian millionaires.

        But then I saw a flash arrogance on Victor’s face, followed by a touch of delight. He was testing me, pushing me. He felt a certain power. Victor wanted me to cross a terrible moral line and did not seem to care if it would haunt me forever.

       “Kill me, please,” he repeated, even more intensely.

       What was there in the room to kill him with? He wasn’t plugged into any machine I could turn off. The nurses would call the police. I’d be arrested. I could spend a long time in jail. I might even be executed. 

      I sensed he was enjoying the game, even in his awful pain. I looked up again to where Victor was hanging and saw for a moment the body of an alligator. His head was an alligator’s head with big grinning teeth.

      “No,” I finally said. “I can’t. You could recover.” I started crying, got up and walked away again. I was crying for Victor and for myself. I was crying even for the alligator.

      I’d been living in the bookstore’s basement on four hundred a month for over a year. Roaches would come down the hall from the sump pump and crawl onto my legs. I did not own a car. It had taken me an hour to walk to Seton Hospital on a cold November Sunday while my wife worked the store.

     On the way back to the bookstore  my rebellious mind started whispering, ‘What would Jesus have done? Could Jesus love a man enough to kill a dying person if asked by the dying  person?’ I thought of Sunday school as a ten year old back in the suburbs of San Antonio.

      No, I decided. Jesus had died to save all humankind, not for one person. Jesus would have healed Victor’s sores. Snap. Just like that.

     Too bad Jesus wasn’t around now.

     I was no longer close to Jesus, but we did talk now and then, especially as I was drifting off to sleep.

    Victor died two months later while on a private plane flying back to Mexico. He was asleep and slid into death in spite of the pain.

     I try to focus on the good times with Victor down at the bookstore, on our great conversations about absurdity and how to make a good life, as we waited for a customer to come in.

      It’s twenty years later now. I moved to Chicago ten years ago to manage computers for Chicago Trust Bank. I remain a little guilty  I didn’t do what Victor demanded. I could have relieved his terrible suffering. Maybe the arrogance and delight I saw in his face was not there. Maybe my mind wanted to see those things in order to get me out of the situation. The alligator, after all, wasn’t there.

      I don’t understand the tragedies of this world. I fear the alligators and understand why people turn to Jesus. Onward I say, through the guilt! Find the pleasures life can give. I am married now and have two children.

More than Enough

Take it out

and spin it in your hand

as if that is what

it was always meant to do.

These are the moments that see us

undeniably under,

promising things physically impossible

to come through with.

But still,

it’s the hope

that proceeds everything,

and most days,

that’s more than enough.

The Interim

A rock embedded in the wall

near the bottom of a canyon

knows nothing of the constant pressure,

the massive force under which it operates,

because that’s all it’s known

since before history,

or somewhere thereabouts.

You see, it’s all about perspective,

stretching that timeline to the

far reaches of our collective imagination,

neverminding the present troubles,

or at least shrinking them

to their true infinitesimal form.

But it’s so hard to practice this zen

when every horizon

illuminates the suffering of

everyone

who could be anyone

who could be you.

On a long enough timeline,

everyone’s survival rate

drops to zero,

but what we do in the spaces

between where the string is cut

is what matters,

whether we choose to

plant

or paint

or burn.

Consequences

Mom told me

if I messed with raw meat,

especially raw birds,

I’d get sick and die.

It was a practical warning,

since we lived out in the woods;

feral cats

and coyotes

and stray dogs

always leaving half-eaten presents

that she didn’t want me covered in,

because who knew when

the well would run dry,

and a drive to town

just for a shower at the Y

was always such a hassle.

So, defiantly standing in that trailer

in 198-whatever,

I laid a palm flat on the

package of uncooked chicken.

It was still frozen,

so cold, it didn’t take long

for my hand to begin to hurt.

I pulled it away,

and rubbing it, thought:

If I die, I’ll be in so much trouble.

Weather Report

She stands under a rotting eve,

waiting for the

storm to pass.

This has been going on

longer than she can remember;

seeking questionable shelter

from a life that

continuously dumps.

Regardless of her

ample experience,

she always finds herself

soaked in some way.

But right now,

as nothing physical but sunshine

threatens her day,

she hides,

because everything is a storm

when she refuses to see

anything else.

Trees flutter in the breeze,

no cars pass to thicken the air;

it’s all a reflection of

someone else’s ideal.

There’s little but desolation behind her,

and all she can see ahead

is the unveiled threats

of an uncaring world.

A cloud purer than watercolor

passes overhead,

but all she can envision

is the coming torrent.

She stands under a rotting eve,

waiting for the storm to pass,

but it never does.

Sunrise

We admit that we see things

only from forgotten corners;

a less than desirable perspective,

but it’s the one we’ve got,

flowering from a slant view,

we see little but refractions,

and we use those to create

our own infractions,

pulverizing the semblance

of community,

terrorizing any sense of

coming to balance.

Last night,

tonight,

tomorrow;

it all blends into a blandness

felt by all,

but acknowledged by none.

So we see these things

only from forgotten corners,

but sometimes

we can look to and from afar,

and can almost make out

a new horizon.

James Benger is the author of several books of poetry and prose. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and the Riverfront Readings Committee, and is the founder of the 365 Poems in 365 Days online workshop. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and children.