Published

First Quarter

Spotlight

Gray and raven under a soft evening glow

Pretzel legs next to the fireplace

Grasping time

My eyes tally the cars

On Lake Road

Scanning for my parents’ 1997 Toyota Corolla

My grandmother’s soft, wrinkled palm

Opens for my forehead

But I pounce away

And over to the fridge

Pressing my face against

A cold jug of milk

The refrigerator light floods

My deceptively cold feet and I

The burning star of the show

Sigh with a smile

Forgetting the need for gratitude

For childhood.

First Semester

Veined imitations of sunsets on leaves

Warm the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze.

As the night extends and the sunshine grieves,

Persephone sparks nature’s own disease.

When the curl of old petals strain to stay

And the light chatter of the woods must pause,

The evenings, blanched in old photo gray,

Accent the aging of silhouette claws.

Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole

Snatching the air from autumn’s brief show.

The morning, blue like a departed soul,

Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow.

And so the puppeteer of wind warps sleet

As winter celebrates poor fall’s defeat.

 1/4

"I'm one-eighth German, one tenth British, one-fourth Finnish, and there's

Some amount of French, Swedish,

And [insert-European-nationality-here], too,"

Those other Americans say.

"I'm Chinese," I say.

I forget that quarter of a Mongol in me,

That pie graph slice that's wider in my cousins.

Yes, Mongol, such as

Genghis Khan and yurts

Scattered across the valley, shaped like plump pork buns.

Not Mongolian like the country, but instead

Mongolic like the ethnic group:

Zero point four percent of China, yet

Twice the number of those in Mongolia.

I forget a culture so close and foreign;

I forget the beaded headdresses,

The hot pink silk flowers on black fabric,

The long strings sliding over raven hair.

I forget the rippling grasslands

And the dusty trip

Away from Jilin, in a car stuffed with

Fractions

Totaled up to three Mongols among the five of us.

Limitations

As x approaches infinity, the limit of me approaches what?

Answer: A C on my first calculus exam, that's what.

Really, from where did those mythical minds—

                Leonhard Euler,

                                Carl Friedrich Gauss,

                                                Joseph-Louis Lagrange,

—Capture their breakthroughs?

How did this eighth grader end up here, deciphering

                Squeeze Theorem

                                l’Hôpital’s Rule

                                                And solids of revolutions?

One glance across the lecture hall,

And fear trickles through the air,

Diffused in admiration for those who

Fervently hunt the unknown,

Gobble equations,

And vomit novel-sized proofs.

Suppose y is defined as the function of x

By an equation of the form...

Please let me scratch down Q.E.D. soon.

Beijing

One

Of one hundred seven billion, six hundred two million, seven hundred seven thousand, seven hundred ninety one

Lives that have ever blinked on this planet

Smacks me hard as I close the taxi's green door

And face the endless stream of the seventh most populous city

In the world on a sultry afternoon. 

How can one teenage girl

Become anything more than average

In a sea so vast? 

The sunless skies and bold Han characters

Engulf the city 

Until even the crowds have diminished

To short breaths in eternity

And the smoky, squat noodle shop

Clinking with

Flowery chopsticks on flowery ceramic

On the corner of

Two redundant streets

Diminishes down to nothing with

Me.

I don't understand T.S. Eliot 

It's 11:55 p.m.

The violet hour's long gone

No taxi's waiting

For anything

Except polishes on these last bits of homework

And sleep.

P.S. I actually really like April.

Piano

A mental switch clicks

And a melody strings together.

No raspy bumps or screeches

Like a flute

Just clear dots of sound

Running, sinking, blending

Turning, trilling, cascading

Bouncing, rumbling, flowing

Across false white ivory.

Poem Portrait

Dean Isaacson
He breathes sports,
With baseball and basketball surpassing oxygen.
It runs through his veins,
Drained from a lacrosse player mother and a hurdler father,
Circulating through him from fingertips to toes
As he and athletics blend within the heart.
“If there was a ball, I would play with it,” he says.
He hates to lose more than he loves to win,
And no soccer after school freshman year
Buried his brain in boredom.

When he was little,
He sought the simple “Thank You”
That superheroes collected.
Time strengthened him.
His height shot up
Three inches last summer, five last year.
And now
He scores a goal,
A basket,
Or a home run
Like Superman saves the day.
This heroic tinge in this sixteen year old
Reigned when he saved a little kid
From an approaching car two years ago.

He sprints parallel with time,
The supporter for his dreams
And an unforgiving force that he realizes
Has pulled others, too.
When he saw his cousins
For the first time in ten years
The carefree games of tag
On a mint lawn had long passed
To make way for awkward small talk
Between almost strangers.