Days Incoming
Let the morning awaken, let the skies be free
Let the trees be brushed by the gentle wind and breeze.
Let the sun come out and play, and let the clouds gently move throughout the day
Let the giraffes stand up tall, let the worms dig down deep.
Let the animals crawl, hop, jump, and sing.
Let the birds in the sky feel the wind in their wings.
Let all who wander, all who speak, unite as one, while remaining unique.
Let you and me become close friends, even past when the day has it’s end.
Let this be a lesson, to all who hear, that life is just incoming, but do not fear.
Let your worries drift away,
Let them fall to your sides,
Let all nature live, breathe, and die.
Taste The Wind
I can taste the wind, the flavor of cold air as it brushes through my lungs.
I can feel the air in my veins, the chill they provide, but also the warmth, how it tells me I’m alive.
I can see the colors they make, in streaks across the sky as it guides the clouds home.
I can hear the whispers they send me, the secrets they spill of, ones that they were too afraid to yell.
I can smell the wind, all the scents it carries in its soul towards new skies, places, friends.
I can taste the wind, feel its rhythm, and see its path.
I can hear the wind, its song, smell its presence, and how it almost never smells wrong.
Go on, taste the wind, chill yourself. Feel its strength, see just how, hear its momentum with emotions so strong, smell its trail, going back to where it belongs.
Perceiving Passion
You cannot possess passion within you.
Maybe for a moment you could attain it,
But it was never truly yours.
It is not something you hold, but passion’s grip can be deep and heavy.
You become fitted with passion. Soaring, surging, gushing,
Pounding, pressing passion.
It claws at you from the inside out,
Or it latches onto you, trying to become an inside awareness.
Awareness.
It is an Awareness.
You can sense that passion there, though you cannot reach out and grab it.
When you are aware of that passion, nothing happens.
But, if you put it into action,
That subject you’ve been vigorously trying to express easily flows out of you,
Flying from your fingertips, floating above your mind,
Levitating in your thoughts.
Yet, when you use up all that passion, you return back to your questioning and wondering-
Grabbing at any thought that could make you feel that way again.
But passion is never your possession.
It is a moment of awareness and self-apprehension.
Home Without a Home
The middle of spring brings warmth into a person’s life, filling them with a character and vibrancy that flows between one another as greetings are exchanged among new people—much like how birds call to one another as if they've been friends in past lives. I imagined it would feel that way. Waking up to the fresh air and the smell of bacon wafting through the house, I would climb up the stairs in my comfiest pajamas and settle into a chair to eat, feeling content as I looked forward to an afternoon of biking, exploring, and embracing each new day.
It changed after her. She had never been a crucial part of my everyday life, but she was a cherished detail in my heart. I think of the cookies she brought on my birthday and the extra loaves of banana bread she made, even when she didn’t have any to spare for herself. Her adorable baskets at Easter and the decorations she hung around her porch for Halloween always lifted my spirits, even when they were meant to be spooky. All those memories are now tucked away in boxes—though not moving boxes. To be honest, I don’t want to revisit those memories; they have too much structure, and examining them one last time feels too precarious. But denying their existence would be just as wrong.
Those afternoons in the sun, sipping the iced tea she made for my brother and me, and savoring turtle cookies she made especially for us, as long as we won one of her card games—things we always managed to do. Of course, it was only spring. By winter, I wouldn’t feel the pain of forgetting her, nor would her lawn. It used to be always freshly cut, adorned with neatly trimmed hedges, frolicking butterflies, and stone statues standing proudly beside them. But that’s all gone now; everything is quiet. The birds have yet to realize her absence, but they will, just as they will come to feel what I feel and see what I have seen. For now, they have springtime to enjoy.
Today, I stood next to her grave, flowers propped against the stone with her name etched into it. I couldn't bear to look up and read it—doing so would make her absence too real. Her love will forever reign in my heart and linger on this Earth. I sensed that something was out of place when she left, and since then, I haven’t been able to fill the home she built in my soul. Rest in peace among the stars, where your true home now resides.
Sweet Summer Memories
Some of the many memories I always cherish in my heart are the summer weekends spent at my aunt's house, where homemade meals created a warm atmosphere for my siblings and me. We would commonly arrive sometime in a late Friday Afternoon and attend their Catholic Church on Sunday before getting packed to go home that night, stuffed with cookies. I fondly reminisce on trips to the local grocery store with my cousins, where we would excitedly list out the essential snacks and fruit we needed to buy for the boat ride on Saturday. Then, after we compiled and collected every snack we could think of, we would look for any additional ingredients to bake cookies and roast s'mores that evening. My aunt would help us make cookies from scratch, often improvising, using sources on the internet with no real recipe. It was such a delightful feeling to watch the eggs, flour, and sugar all combine into a thick batter as we stirred them until we added the chocolate chips in and it became more lumpy. We never really waited for the oven to go off; it normally waited for us as we sat downstairs together in our cousins’ basement playing Uno. Loron would always do some random, stupid trick in which he would draw a card when it was yellow, play a wild card, turn the color back to yellow, and then wait for his turn to draw a card when it was still the same color. The smell of those cookies always found its way to waft down the stairs and fill the entire house with its sugary scent. If we brought swimsuits, we would sometimes sit in their Jacuzzi at 9:00 p.m., waiting for the cookies to cool, or we would set a movie and pop popcorn to pass the time.
Memories of those times down at the lake linger, especially one incident involving an irritating bee that followed us around the water the entire time we tried to bring the boat back up. We would start on the boat ramps when it was early afternoon, right when the air would start to steam up, making some feel extra tired after being stuck in a car since the early morning. Once the boat was in the water, we would scout out a place to chill and sit down to eat lunch while we fished or swam in the waves. Coolers filled with watermelon, strawberries, water, ice, and Pepsi, along with a beach bag packed with chips, cookies, Goldfish, and sometimes even water guns, would be brought out from the boat onto the sand.
We would never leave a place fully satisfied with food, since we would end up moving places eventually, tubing along the way, or slowing down to fish for a while and nap while the boat rocked softly to the incoming tides and ripples. When we reached land again, we would reapply sunscreen and hang wet towels up on the branches of low-hanging trees. The boat would either be fully anchored or taken back out to go tubing and fishing, leaving the rest of us, mostly the girls, the time to swim, tan, read, or skip rocks.
We would get picked up again one last time in the boat, then hauled back in from the trailer to hop off onto land, and tasked with the chore of cleaning off all the lake water from the sides to avoid doing it later. Dinner was usually something with pasta and a side of salad, like spaghetti, which I never really enjoyed. Still, I always tried to finish my food for my aunt, who didn't take kindly to wasted food.
Sunday mornings were typically calm and peaceful. We'd have cereal, or on a super special occasion, we'd get pancakes. However, we'd constantly end up scrambling out the door to head to church. Since my family was not Catholic, we would either remain seated or try our best to mimic our cousins during the service. Occasionally, if we weren't busy after church, we'd go to Tumbleweed, a regional restaurant in town, and either eat from their menu or their buffet.
After satisfying our appetites, we would return to their house, and play around on the trampoline, run with the dogs, and drive the Polaris while our aunt made lunch. Whether it was noodles and pasta, or fried chicken with chips, there was always a pitcher of lemonade alongside the food my aunt made, and a platter of cookies waiting right next to the salad. Our parents would pick us up in the evening, and send us home with a bag of chocolate cookies, and luggage to stack up in the trunk of the van. The drive back home after those long, joyous days is a cherished memory filled with laughter, love, and delicious food.
“A Commercial Looping on Sports Radio” by Jared Harél. Arts & Letters, Issue 34, 2017.
Review over Jared Harél’s “A Commercial Looping on Sports Radio”
The poem “A Commercial Looping on Sports Radio” was very enjoyable to read, with its big relation to the reader through the writer's own thoughts on an ad playing in a sports radio. Their thoughts on the commercial brings real-life relevance in a poem through small details in life that might be otherwise overlooked. The conflicting emotions between the ad topic itself and how the writer relates his character to that help connect to memories and symbolical similarities, which provide a big depth of story with opposite, yet similar feelings at the same time. In the poem Jared Harél writes two lines that each have opposite standing emotions, but they each help to structuralize the tone setting in the story together, “Even the static stills and I think,/ Abort. Run for your life!” (46) Those details, even though they could have such a varying sense of rush or calmness apart, make a connected, understandable moment together. Even though the writer writes a bigger quantity about the commercial the character is seeing, he still manages to bring out the character into that dimension by having the reader see the opinions formed by that person by that commercial and make uniqueness of a perspective display to conjoin two separate objects. When the writer displays the two different actions of the character and the commercial together, they flow more as one, almost as if they are forming another story with poetry, “A Sunday in Bryant Park./ An engagement ring burning a hole/ in his cargos.” (46-47) The perspective of which Jared Harél forms both the person and the radio adds help to gather a deeper moment not just within its own blending story, but connecting back to the radio ad’s theme and setup, and the characters memories.