Amber Alert
It went missing last night. I’m not so sure exactly when
I lost it. Maybe around
eleven thirty, I don’t know. Whenever the street lights burned
shadows permanent on the concrete is when it happened.
The news was blaring white noise.
I’m sandpaper. It became rough around dusk, whenever
we are told to look shifty-eyed before taking every step.
It went missing last night.
That’s when they began to take form, morph around me like
a nightmare. Here comes the cat-calls, the five o’clock whistles,
the construction men on a break calling down to me to see if
they can renovate my basement, take a whack at breaking down
walls between my legs to get those enviable open floor plans
laid out flat like a red carpet welcome mat. The time was around
midnight, yes that’s it. It was midnight. I remember now.
The circle in the sky blurred in my tears, looked just like a white light
before death. I thought I was going home. I remember now.
He left, and I laid stiff like driftwood on the floor. The news was blaring
in the background. It was a repeat – “It’s ten o’clock,
do you know where your children are?”
I laughed to myself. I’ve lost something too.
My child(hood) went missing
last night
and isn’t coming back home.
Or Does it Explode?
A paper examining Langston Hughes’ poem Harlem was
frozen solid to the ground in front of the
only abortion clinic in the town.
Now, maybe it’s a coincidence of the
closest high school being four towns over
or the fact that tears can turn to ice when it’s
fifteen below but today, my mother decided to get a tattoo
over her c-section scar of a crescent moon shattering in front of the
opalescence of the sun. I asked her if the moon was supposed to be
waning, and she wondered why the moon would ever wail, and I guess
there isn’t really as much of a difference between the two
as one would think.
Today in psychology class, a boy raised his hand and asked why
object permanence is a step denoted in the sensorimotor stage of
development, or even at all. “Shouldn’t we inherently know that the world
doesn’t revolve around ourselves?” he asked.
“Should babies have to learn that the world doesn’t disappear after
a moment of darkness?”
His question belied the silence that followed like a shadow afterwards.
Even the teacher was stricken stiff, a corpse mummified by his words.
A voice, shaking and low, comes from a girl in the back, with a hand
clutching her stomach ever so gently.
“Do we even know the difference?”
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it disappear -
or do we try and forget it was ever
an idea in the first place?
Jessenia Class is a upcoming senior at Union High School in New Jersey. She has been published in JUST POETRY!!!, Brouhaha Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY and others. She writes for local newspapers and most recently has won the New Jersey PTA Reflections program for a literature entry of poetry two years in a row.
