On Being Captain of Philadelphia's Top Ranked 1996 Academic Decathlon Team - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

We had a problem with Talisha.

She was known for being a bad highlighter.

She would highlight everything.

She told us she highlighted only

what she felt was important but it seems

she felt everything was important.

The academic team would sit around and

have conversations about how to address

Talisha’s highlighting problem.

Do we keep her away from team materials?

Do we have an intervention? Someone suggested

giving her two differently colored highlighters,

in an attempt to teach her the difference

between selective highlighting and a free-for all.

Turns out, two highlighters made her problems

worse. We were finally forced to agree

that we’d all just have to accept Talisha’s

highlighting issues, because we needed her.

She was our regional Teen Jeopardy champion,

and was the only one who knew anything about

Victorian Literature.

Sometimes, when I hear stories about other

people’s teen years, I feel like they are talking

about some exotic country,

one I know I’ll never visit: the slang they used,

the boys they kissed, the nights they snuck out,

the parents they’d upset,

all the things they had to worry about

and all the things that they never ever ever

had to worry about.

Depression, Too, Is a Kind of Fire - Taylor Mali

I’m an idiot because once

before we were married she asked me whether I knew

that we would not be having children

if we did get married, and I said yes.

And because she knew I was lying,

she asked if I was really okay with that.

And because I’m an idiot I said yes again.

And once during a fight, not married

more than two years, she said she felt like my first wife,

and I, like an idiot, assured her that she was.

She worked out at the gym five times a week

and smoked as many packs of ultra lights,

and I’m an idiot because when I asked her why,

She said, Because I hate myself and I want to die.

And I laughed and said something I don’t recall,

something completely and utterly insufficient.

From the roof of our apartment,

I saw 40 or 50 people jump from the towers

on a Tuesday morning—we used to be able to see them to the south,

just as, to the north, we can still see

(and by “we” I guess I mean now just me)

the Empire State Building,

which still steeps me in gratitude

because I’m an idiot—

out of the smoke with arms flailing.

And I swear I saw a perfect swan.

And I was going to write a poem

about how fire is the only thing

that can make a person jump out a window.

And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—

call me her knight in shattered armor—

could have loved her more,

or told the truth about children.

But depression, too, is a kind of fire.

And I know nothing of either.

LENS - Andrea Gibson

I’ve been practicing gratitude.

I’ve been skipping entire weeks.

Practicing a wider lens. Listening

for the bully’s heartbeat

Hearing it in my own chest.

I’ve been remembering the time I cried

in a cloud of tear gas at a peaceful protest.

How I decided I was too soft to last,

and then I decided to be softer.

I’ve been remembering way way back

to the moment they told me Jesus walked on water.

How I knew whatever I’d grow up to believe

I would never try to wrestle a miracle

away from anyone’s reason to live.

I’ve been remembering how I wrestled a miracle

away from your reason to live.

If only shame could wash me clean,

but that is never how healing works.

Nobody ever won anything from anyone

thinking the whole world was out of their league.

I’m sorry you know

what I look like when no one is looking.

I don’t expect anyone to believe

in justice and forgiveness at the same time.

If it’s any consolation

I feel like a ferris wheel in a snowbank

twenty years after they shut down the park.

If it’s any consolation I’ve been living in my head

whenever anyone tells me I have a good heart.

And I think about you. I think about you. 

untitled 8 - Mira Gonzalez

it is 2:05 in the morning

your foot on the brake is preventing the car from drifting backwards

he is kissing you first deliberately

then in a lazy or confused way

you know he is trying to communicate something important

and maybe he has wanted you for a long time

but his tongue is moving around your mouth

you begin to wonder if he wants to kiss you

or if he wants to push his way through you

you can see his bedroom window from where you are standing

he is climbing over fences and unlocking them from the inside

he says ‘go up those stairs and turn right’

you swear that you would have loved him a year ago

and every day since then

you are waiting at the top of his stairs

you don’t know where to look or what to touch

you are thinking about the ‘check engine’ light in your car

you are aware of certain things while he has sex with you

helicopter noises through an open window

a bottle of blue cough syrup

street signs indicating the direction to an eastbound freeway

he is strong and gentle and you wish he was only one of those things

he is tracing his fingers across the edge of you

everything is quiet other than a barely audible sound

in the space between his arm and his shoulder

he says ‘why are you sighing so much’

you say ‘that is just how I breathe’

he says ‘you don’t want to be here’

HEAVENLY CREATURE - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

For Missy

I remember the day you showed up at the bus stop:

quiet, pale, a thick veil of dark hair, we stared

at each other through overgrown bangs. We were just

beginning our dry sentences at Baldi Middle School.

In those days, our jeans would be tattooed weekly

with the coded names of every boy who flicked

his eyes our way. The backs of our hands became

necks and lips for practicing on. I once even

doused my backpack with my brother’s cologne,

a sad effort to at least smell like I’d had a boyfriend.

Walking around your housing complex, we’d stare

through the windshields of every man who drove by.

We thought of our bodies as dangerous chemicals,

our breasts as match tips waiting for love’s flinty gaze

We were sure all the boys around had firecracker hearts

just waiting to explode. And look, I know I know I know

I am not telling the whole truth. Things in your house

were different, were not right, were accepted because

maybe no one knew any better, or maybe they did

and didn’t care. And whenever the whole dark truth

would spill out, I remember I’d gather my features

into the center of my face, unable to figure out

the right combination for my concern, for fresh alarm.

I’d forget how to sit, how to blink, breathe. It’s true,

sometimes you look back and all the things

you should have done rise up like volcanic islands,

whole civilizations, whole existences, whole lifetimes.

But what did we know then? Fourteen, I took

the hammer of my dumb tongue and tried to tap

comfort into your impossibly small ears,

your impossibly small fists. We were kids,

and the future was our dependable escape plan.

We’d be gone soon, so you had just better suffer through

it all now. We’d be gone, so until then, I tried

to make you laugh. I’m sorry I never realized

I could’ve unlocked your exit earlier, that I

could’ve released your story from the shogun

of my own throat. The letters you send me now

are like postcards from that hopeful future:

you are okay, you are alright, with no return address.

So this poem is a telegram to let you know that

I still think about you, that I’m still proud of you,

that when I remember you, I always remember you

as beautiful.

in which you anxiously anticipate events that will not occur - Mira Gonzalez

in the end he told you that he didn’t want you

but he never did you the courtesy of leaving

out of necessity, you reconstructed your identity around being alone

though you almost never thought of it in those terms

you spent time allowing all the wrong people to think you are beautiful

watching them blindly perform unreciprocated feelings onto you

at a distance twice removed from the act

because you refuse to know the feeling of not loving anything

though the feeling will force itself into you sometimes

everyone will tell you what the most painful part is

they will say it’s the moment nothing is left for you in him

or it’s the moment he finds you in someone else

but nobody will tell you that it is possible

to move further from reality every day

until there are no parts of you in anything