For my own writing, I am including three of my pieces that I think mostly relate to the theme I am trying to explore. This does not mean that my writing pieces will follow the same format, length, style, or genre; I am merely putting up some of my pieces that I think I can get a jump start from and use to guide me on how far I am from achieving what I want to incorporate in my magazine.
there's the dust on the bedsheets
there are houses nearby
that echo stories, long lost by the lamppost
on 22nd street.
I brushed my hand along the ruins
of this house
and found the dirt bristling among many.
you ask me, why do I haunt this house?
why do I take interest
in a long forgotten memory
where children roared
and fires cracked beneath the bedsheets
and where she came running
outside her house
and knocking on mine one night
late after 3 a.m.
the fires surged the walls
and emptied any color painted
with patterns and lines, with intricacy and hopes
that the paint would never chip away.
yet I remember how she sat on the steps by her front door,
smoking cigarettes that infiltrated her lungs
and accumulated there, leaving nothing but soot and ash
soot and ash.
"want light?"
I asked one day,
as she sat on her door step,
and her eyes widened like a wild animal's
awakened from an eternal sleep,
as if the man she called her husband
were the bear who engorged all
when disturbed from his sleep.
and as it ended,
the fires left the bear inside the house,
engulfed by raging fires he himself started.
it ate away at the bedsheets and mirrors alike,
yet as she knocked on my door late after 3 a.m.,
I could see in her eyes that it was the scorched, burnt paintings
she mourned for,
the only remnant of any talent she had
before the bear had taken command, and stolen any
wist of dreams she had.
she's sitting on my bedpost,
covered in sheets and covers to wipe away the soot
that stung to her skin.
she's sitting on my bedpost,
staring at my clean, pristine floors
while her children pull at her dress,
demanding answers
to soothe the aching pain of
"where is daddy?"
that woman,
she's long gone,
but her pain still haunts me,
and I still linger by that house,
demanding answers
of how our youth wastes away
beneath burnt bedsheets.
The City Lights
I walked on a sidewalk one night, and I saw the jagged lines zig zag through the pavement, disturbing the flow of the city stones. The city was alit with the torchlights hovering like fireballs in the air, illuminating by-passers hurrying through those winding streets. There were cars everywhere; the stench of gasoline alive and the honking of car horns audible over the sound of my own breathing. Despite the crowds of people and the buzz in which they moved, I felt entranced within the scenery, as if I were enveloped by the aura of the energy vibrating around me, inhaling the cigarette smoke and the evaporated sweat hanging. I stepped each foot with a graceful swirl, as if I were a dancer performing a show, as if my art were displayed with every inch of my movements. Time, for once, did not exist. It was just the city and me, the lamp lights and me, the concrete stones and me. The cars were still hurrying past, yet there was one that caught my eye as I stood bedazzled. The car did not hurry; it silently grazed past the chaos, as if, like me, it was aware of the city around us. It kept moving and slowly came to a stop by the side. Out rushed a man who slammed the door and glanced around, to make sure that no one noticed his hesitancy, his paranoia. He then peeked through the windows and nodded, taking one last stride with his eyes. He was doing it rather poorly, I thought, since his eyes did not meet mine; his eyes were not aware of my presence. He began heading away, and after plugging my earphones deeper, I followed.
Chestnut
That boy, you heard them say he's such a gem. Every time you saw him, a streak of his chestnut hair had covered his forehead, and a part of you longed to know him and stroke the hair out of his forehead so you could see what type of gem he hid, to assure that it was worth the rumors.
Truth is, you couldn't bear the rumors. Not the gem, nor the one when they all said your daddy had crawled into mama's bed one night and pushed her legs apart so hard that she woke up bruised the next morning. They kept saying that if he was still allowed to do those things, one day your mama wouldn't wake up at all.
You hated the rumors because you knew they were right. They were right, yet they were wrong, because all your daddy had done was seat you next to him in church so you'd both laugh at the way he mimicked the priest's words. His attention was always guided elsewhere, yet during church, he seemed so intent on making a fool out of the priest, on making the point that he did not believe the lies he was spoon-fed as a child, that he made a fool out of himself.
It was all a nice morning when you saw the boy with chestnut hair again. The sun was shining at your back and you had allowed yourself to bathe alongside the air and the plants and pretended you lived within nature. But then the chestnut hair had blocked your view, and you saw that the boy had chestnut eyes, too. His eyes were gleaming and fearful, like someone had hurled a snowstorm on them, and he was saying something you couldn't hear. Suddenly, you couldn't hair anything, because a gunshot had fired and the ringing of it was still in your ears, colliding with the ringing of your heart stabbing at your chest bones. You didn't know what to do, because you knew where it was coming from, and you found your hands suddenly intertwined within those of the chestnut hair boy. You were surprised at his strength, because he was able to drag you with him, but in reality your body had just grown limp.
There was an urgency within his footsteps, like he wanted to lead you away somewhere safe, and he kept repeating that it was all going to be alright. He repeated it so much that it began to sound like he was saying it just to soothe the aching dull of his body, and you yanked away your hand from his, because everything they had told you was a lie, even him. You grabbed his face and slapped the chestnut hair away from his forehead, and you found nothing. There was no gem in this boy, just a frail small body with bones and hollow cheeks. They lied to you, he lied to you, and you wanted to see daddy again, to marvel at how white he kept his teeth when he smiled at you in church.
You ran to your mama's bed and found the blood soaking through the sheets and to the mattress; there was a stench, a body, and there was your mama standing against the wall, gun in her hand. You looked in her eyes and saw that they were chestnut, too, and you suddenly understood the chestnut boy, that he was no gem. He was no gem because he was a bastard boy, and yet they called him one even though they all knew he was worth nothing.
Those chestnut eyes of your mama bore into yours and you screamed at her to stop, to not leave you, because she'd already taken away your daddy from you, and all that was left was here: his body and a pool of blood. The boy was there again, holding your arms, yet you quivered against him because his touch was poison, and you fought so hard. His touch worked on you, because you were so frail and weak, even weaker than him. You weren't able to run to your mama and point the gun away from her own heart, but to yours. The boy knew what'd you do and so he held you tight, while your mama just kept staring at you with the gun at her chest. You were so helpless, so desperate, yet the sound of the echoing gunshot next managed to null your body and steal all the chestnut from the boy's hair.
