1. family and parenting
2. children

The Winning Poems Juliek​
by Miles Turpin His sound through silence. His flame through night. Dangling over the depths of death For eternity, His soul is attached to the world by strings. A faint flicker of life among ashen heaps of bodies, The lone violinist begins to conduct His concert for the dead. The ghostly bow enclasped by bony fingers Glides across the strings To the faint rhythm of winter. Souls embroiled by Holocaust Fuse with the haunting song, And in that one moment, He will have played forever: His charred past, his extinguished future Echoes through a supernatural medium Beyond his physical mortality. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Into the specter of darkness Erupts this ballad of death Like an acoustic supernova Of life and light; His blazing soul explodes out of A decaying physical skin, The seams worn by the untold years Of inhuman captivity. The light of a thousand suns was flung off 0 Into the cosmos, Fleeing the dying star, In hopes of finding a home In some other sky of the universe, To tell his story. The remnants of this bursting sun Lived on as starry guts strewn Across the night sky, constellations whispering epics of true evil and redemption. Their colored splatter riddles the dark canvas of our memories. His bow quivers, and falls silence cuts through its sound night smothers its flame its strings snap Letters to Sarah ​
by Lukah Aguilera Dear Sarah, Everytime I see pictures of you I am reminded of long, thick brown hair that we used to complain about on hot days near Sunnyside’s private park. I think of how that hair held you back from feeling confident and free; and the only reason why we kept it was because mom loved running her fingers through it. She always braided your locks, making sure no strand was left behind. Dear Sarah, I remember how much you loved that blue dress, that one from the disney store? Oh mygod, you’d sleep, eat and play in that thing as if it were your own skin. You’d always introduce yourself like, “Hello, my name’s Cinderella. What’s your name?” Followed by a small curtsy. We would never correctly introduce ourselves until 2014 because it was easier to put on a dress and be someone else than coming home and hating your own reflection. Dear Sarah, At 2010 your spirit began to fade. In 2011 you tried to hang yourself from the bathroom ceiling of a friend’s house… chipping paint as your only audience. You succeeded that year in dying­I mean not physically dying but as an idea; you and I were not one anymore. Dear Sarah, When 2013 came you and I adopted a unisex name. One people would call you over at Sunnyside’s private park because your hair stuck up in a way that created an alfalfa above your head. Both of us bridged together ‘Alfie’. Alfie had many feminine traits they had taken from you, Sarah. Alfie was confident, gentle and kind. Alfie also bared my more stereotypically masculine traits like my leadership, bravery and of course my charm. But inside..Alfie was nothing but a battleground. Pink and Blue blood was shed inside them like a splattered canvas. Alfie, was but a chessboard checkered in gender. An experiment driven mad with scraps of hair and dirty ace bandages. Alfie was the poison both of us shared. They harboured both of our insecurities in one being, Alfie was already weak and didn’t deserve to be tugged back and forth between us. Let’s face it, we were all miserable and confused that year. Dear Sarah, I know how much it must hurt you. I know how you feel every time you pass by that park. I know how much it hurts to feel me, binding your breasts so I can be flat like the rest of the boys. I know how much you wanted a child to call your blood. I know that testosterone will kill yours­ OUR children. I know how you dread this slow process. I know that you hate it I use YOUR body to write down MY name just as much as I hate hearing yours from a teacher that mistakes me for you. Dear Sarah, I am so sorry, for everything but I want you to know that you are NOT the strand left behind. That you were NOT a mistake. Dear Sarah, You know sometimes I think “I’ve killed her. I’ve killed a daughter, a niece, a sister...a mother. “ But then I remember that little girl who hated her reflection. You were dead for a while..but your death has made me stronger and I just wanted to say thank you. Yours, Lukah Night Sky by ​
Caroline Kiesling I still remember, telling myself to remember, closing my eyes and going slow. The air had cooled quickly, and the water lapped at my toes. I couldn't tell up from down, and it was peaceful. The glass in the sky was dark, but stars poked holes in that abyss, and I could see them below me, dancing wide and tall. Winking to the flow of the water, trying to tell me something that I felt I already knew. The only sound that met my ears, was the slow creak of a cricket's wing, as the wind brushed through the swaying birch trees. And streaks of blue ribbons, wrapped the sky like a gift, cut against the sharp black mountain’s edge, that rose tall above the black waters, as the earth and that lucid empyrean met in a compromise. I looked around, to try and made sense of it. And for the first time, I felt it hard to remember anything else. Parenthood ​
by Katherine Mettler I recognize the organized stone tiles of our front patio, and the frail plastic blue lawn chair that my mother is sitting in, making the bottom sink down to the ground with her weight. They say pregnant women have a glow, but in this image, there is not a soft lining of warmth like lamp light around her uncovered belly, but ecstatic crystal rays sweeping across the familiar greenery of Connecticut summer, blessing and drawing in everything at once. There is no ambiguity, no fog in the horizon, or uncertainty in her face; she embodies the simplistic but tremendous understanding of life in a way that only a mother can. And in this way she sees, she knows the way he will kick and cry and carve circles under her eyes for months. But she has felt the warm glow within her. She has known all along with conviction the magnitude of his sun rays will forever be enough to light the ever­looming shadow over the beautiful certainty of parenthood.