Category: Poetry

by: Megan Finsel

And we danced together,

You and me, held forever,

8.6 light years, light on our feet.

Trapped in this cosmos this eternity,

Bodies burning, 24,800 Kelvin,

A and B, you and me, welcome to ecstasy.

Around and around, whirling we go; orbital eccentricity.

First 31.5 AU then 8.1 AU and back again,

Held together in this gravitational field,

350,000 times greater than Earth’s,

Redshift, set adrift, amid Heaven’s seas.

It’s a dog-eat-dog universe out there;

They said we’d never make it.

Oh they scoffed: “They’ll sizzle out, shooting stars eventually fizzle.”

Yet while Orion rolled his eyes, while Leo and Gemini laughed and judged,

We were far from Earth, out of body, out of mind,

Glowing like a thousand suns.

Our ultraviolet luminosity was the source of their curiosity.

Together we can burn the brightest,

As we dancealonein space.

Binary; if you’ll be my companion, I’ll be your Primary,

A and B, you and me, welcome to our galaxy.

How can I describe me? If you’ve seen me around campus I always have a paintbrush in my hair. I am an artist and a writer and (whether with words or with paint) telling stories is one of my greatest passions. I strongly believe that words can make a difference, and if my work can make at least one person smile, then I have done my job. I hope someday to be a Special Education teacher, but I know I will always tell stories. Now you know me 🙂

by: Sesshy Sensation

Lilly, the girl everyone finds so silly

She knows what she does, and does it willingly

She offers her services and coax him arduously

Knowing that he in fact belongs to me

She comes off as thoughtless, but she is sly

She makes it her duty to befriend you-you ask why

She knows how you feel for him; information she’s learned

In her mind none of that matters, for a moment he’s yours. Now it is her turn.

Yes Lilly, I know your work from experience, I watch you in depth

Your guard is down, head held high, confidence in every step

You’ve done this for years, you consider yourself a professional

With years I find my eyes cunning, what I have in store is indeed exceptional

You’ve come to settle down, the life you’ve lead not condoned for a wife

I’ve come to befriend, share memories, and learn about your life

You introduce with glee, you’ve been with so many, must have forgotten what you had done

I will never forget, in my mind your neck I have wrung

I see him, offer my services, and coax him arduously

He belongs to you, it’s my turn.

I return the favor Lilly

By: Shannon Powell

Counting pennies to save for a new car

Popping the cork on a new millennium

On pins and needles wondering if it’s a boy or a girl

Lighting candles year after year…it’s amazing how time passes you by

Calculating the risks in choosing happiness

Could I comb out the tangled mess I’d create?

Would this magic eraser take away the stain?

Could this super glue mend the pieces of his shattered heart…

Would there be enough left for hers?

Oh, there’s just not enough tissue to dry up these tears

I think I’m ready to put it all behind me though, and shuffle a new deck of cards

Ahhhh… the colorful rainbows and butterflies he will paint on my soul.

by: Cherri Hewitt

Tentacles squirming

Like worms on a leaf

Amanita potions

Transformation

We seek

Rising rituals

Siberian gnomes

Stirs the beast

Off Norwegian coasts

We forget to remember

Our light

How we died

Over and Over

In Muscarian skies

An array of human experience

Flips through my mind

Shuffled deck of lives

Times

All is forgiven

I find myself again

We are the experience

We find us in the end

We forget so we can be

Form symbiotically

Forever with pine tree

Lost infinitely

Pulled by deep black oceans

We think we’re on an island

And then we

Remember

The Kraken’s arising

by: C.E. Churchill

2,106 miles of burning sun

776 days of hell.

It seems appropriate, at first,

That they named the planet

After the god of war,

But truth is,

All of us know that to

Step onto its blistering surface

would not be a battle

But a massacre,

Engineered by our own greedy hands.

95.32% CO2 atmosphere,

0.376 gs of gravity.

The Red Planet mocks us,

A herald for broken dreams,

Lost hopes.

It calls out to us, full of malice, its words as cruel and

Blackened

As it has made out hearts.

“Come and you die,” its says,

“I am not a rest stop for

You. I am not salvation.”

370 miles of volcanoes,

But with days only 40 minutes longer than our own,

Mars hovers beyond the blue sky,

Too far to see, too far to reach,

Too far to claim.

Second smallest planet in the solar system,

Fourth planet from the sun.

The Red Planet,

It mocks us.

It will never be our home.

Stranger on the Bus by Ksenia Arkhangelski

Where I Come From… by Megan Briggs

A Witch Hunt by Devin Christy

The Red Planet by C.E. Churchill

A Serious Attraction by Megan Finsel

Tabloids by Megan Finsel

Rise of the Kraken by Cherri Hewitt

Elderly Man Found Drowned in River by William Peters

Elusive by Martha Scott

~I Return the Favor~ by Sesshy Sensation

Junk Drawer Winner:
Life and Love in a Junk Drawer by Shannon Powell

Pirate Shanty Winner:
A Scottish Pirate Sea Shanty by Brandie Hyde

1-2-3 Poetry Slam Winner:
by Justin O’berg

by: Martha Scott

Watered deepened to indigo blue beckons softly beyond the brush

Thickened by a thousand years of soldiers marching, stomping on,

Removed by wind, their helmets flew on eagle wings above the hue

Of blue and green, yellow orange and red,

As the search they’d started prepared its get away

To uncover the elusive purple of a flower so rare and pure,

Changing to wolverines that begin to bay

At the little girl that had been kissed

By ladybugs deliciously hibernating in her locks,

Who doesn’t think, so jumps she must

Happily, demonic faces in the air

Christ-like turn from one to four

As a reflection in the mirror tells the story

A continuation of just another trapped

Became as one, a south bound collision

Heralding a north bound train.

Ah, about that purple flower from a time of a long ago

Finally it was pulled and pulled, just beneath the stone

And in the water, it was thrown

With hopes that it was swept away.

Sometimes it doesn’t hurt or feel so bad

Over the ruins we walk today,

As everything that ever mattered

Quite succinctly and just as plainly,

Totally, disintegrated.