By Jordan Esely-Kohlman
In seconds after
exchanging names in a fashion
so pleasant as to
ease my troubled soul,
airs that once clung heavy to lovers
loosened &
crumbled
asunder into
a new bed from whence new truths might bloom.
I hunger for these parcels of your essence.
Feast on
flesh &
drink in
moments unspoken
when I was sure I was you
simply wrapped in a different way, or
perhaps we were jigsaw pieces
kept snug by junctures of
the most supple nothings.
| By Abigail Bechtel
You pass an invisible wall, you begin to snicker and sneer You judge me. You make me your victim. You cannot know where I’ve been or what trials I have gone through nor my joys. And I do not know yours. I cannot judge you back though it would be so easy, though I desperately want to. You make me your victim, but you were victims first, although I cannot know to what. This bonds us. |
We are akin in this way, victims to one another, To prejudice, insecurity, pride The list is infinite. But we are victims, you and I. This doesn’t make you easier to forgive, nor me easier to like. This does not cripple us, Nor empower us. Neither does this make us the same. Those who say, “We’re all the same” are liars. We are not all the same, you and I, but we are also not all different. |
By Jordan Elsely-Kolhman
The sun shone on Monday morn
in strands of flaxen memory.
Out past the horizon sat a visage,
its magnificence sifted through the atmosphere,
but those minuscule collisions resulted
in splendor unrequited.
The gentle warmth of lips shifting
into smiles a million miles away
lifted midnight mists,
weekend haze cut into
static fragments
by moments of focus.
We play our celestial parts,
bodies revolving in and out of
eclipses, simply wishing for
the bliss of glimpses.
This life is but a struggle
through ellipses into
…
periods of certainty.
By Natasha Orpin
Listen, child!
Do you hear it?
Of course not. There was little hope that you
would ever hear and know – listen.
For you run about all day chasing monsters and
digging in the dirt
with a playmate no one sees.
How does one put
to paper a thing silent in nature? How does
one imagine the imaginary friend to look?
This is the trouble
with the ineffable. Yet
the instrument – language – is
not the problem. Listen, child!
Your playmate has scampered off with the monsters and now
you are left to the inexpressible.
Hush now.
Ms. Dickinson will be along shortly.
By Cody Claassen
Stuck in orbit around this place
It never decays
always mere miles
from the flowing shadow pit
of melancholy and mediocrity
Sheer exudes from its centre
And this one can hold
Even the idea of escape velocity gets sucked
towards the hostile maelstrom
it creates
Now sitting at the edge of space and reason
I watch like a shamed voyeur
at the things left undone
A great unwinding is happening
and I am doing nothing
to stop the pulling of chords
I should want to leave
want to forge a way out
want something more
But I don’t
and that unsettles me
more than the constant pull of apathy
By Cody Claassen
Silver begets Bronze
just as mother births child;
a cycle continues,
staying the same and yet changing everything.
Whimsical fantasy shifts into gritty noir
that taint everything with a realism
not yet experienced in this day and age.
A legacy is dirtied, a hero dissloved,
and respect for the future
becomes preposterous.
A beacon emerges
flooding existence with its emerald, ethereal glow
and thunderous lightening applauds its coming
Icons from the past usurp the darkness
that simplicity and innocence still have a place.
Heroes made, Heroes, died, and Heroes reborn
Forever a cycle of continuity.
By Marike Stucky
She listens for his motions, attentively,
but does not hear for the blare of the television.
It’s switched on
the couch
she’s nestled in the crook.
As a little girl
I listened closely as well,
but now I have seen
the things that men can do.
I feel the fear
that salted her trembling lips.
I only wanted someone to love, she tells me.
Can I climb my way out?
The voice-over keeping on
from the television
blares.
By Jocelyn Wilkinson
Backfired
We have some problems
Real life, fucked up, serious ones.
Actually, fucking tons.
Is it our culture?
Is it our government?
Is it our military?
Seriously, what is it?
Because I don’t understand.
My mind is incapable of comprehension
I can find no sense.
The killing, the innocent,
Death doesn’t ruin only the defiled.
Hitting that point,
it ruins society.
Perhaps we encourage it.
Or maybe we just don’t challenge it.
We live, expecting shit to fix itself.
By Kaitlin Schmidt
It occurred to me today, (so long ago)
that you are a bit like the sugar ants that
crawl across my grandmother’s kitchen counter.
Let me tell you about them.
She never could keep them out.
During the dry months
when the heat breeds heavy hopelessness in the air,
the ants scuttle in to escape it.
In, in, in from the house’s every seam
from between the blonde trim and the wall
from behind a loose outlet cover
easiest of all, from a windowsill.
They have no mass no limits nothing slows them.
They are minute dots, black wisps in my vision as they explore
the cool white porcelain sink. They like it there, I think.
By Andrew Unruh
A burned out light in the sky,
its life-spark lost to the aether,
throws shade across its hollow-eyed
desolation tenement lodgers…
Telephone wires above are sizzling like a snare
smoking in the supernatural darkness,
floating across the tops of cities
reproducing flowers of green-gold, red-gold and fire…
The cinders of psychic respiration flow on
within you and without you, as we lay
by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
By Claire Unruh
By Elizabeth Akins
By Audra Miller
By Leah Clark
By Samuel Agoitia
By Terra Scott
By Travon Lewis and Caleb Lázaro
Unofficial team spirit song for Bethel College athletics
Photo Credit: Edward Michael Davila
Free download at:
http://rdaptrecords.bandcamp.com/track/thresher-zone
