Nina Age Fourteen:

I approached the edge with apprehension. The drop was six hundred feet. Jagged rocks protruded from the cliff face like the ones currently forming in the pit of my stomach. I groaned and crouched to the ground hoping that it wouldn’t let go.

“Everyone has to rappel, it’s the only way out of here. Unless, you want to walk down a mountain alone.” David, the climbing instructor, informed us. As I watched my peers one after another fall backwards and out of sight I could not believe my eyes.

I was comforted by the idea of walking alone instead of plummeting together and as I stood up to begin the solitary descent, my legs buckled. I was glued to the ground by hands and legs I no longer knew. I forgot how to move them freely.

Nina Age Eight or Nine:

I lived in a neighborhood full of children to seek or hide from beneath the biggest pine tree on the block. I would wake up every morning and eat cereal while watching cartoons. I would pluck petals from daisies, as he liked me, he liked me not. After wading in a sea of green grass high enough to hide my ankles I would knock on my neighbor’s door and ask for Joey to come out and play. Joey was my best friend from the moment he moved in beside me, I was three, and he was five. I said, “He’s my boyfriend.” And that was that.

Joey and I would always make believe that invisible enemies were coming to take me away. He was the hero who conquered all evils and saved the day. But he couldn’t stop me from saying good-bye.

Nina Age Fourteen:

It is hard to remember whether five or six years went by since the summer I said good-bye. Like it is hard to remember the details of a life-altering altercation. Like it is harder to forget that my life has changed forever. I cannot remember how tight he held me but no one could ever convince me to let go.

Nina Age Eight or Nine:

My family lived down the road from a fraternity row where nude men multiplied annually around autumn’s first chill. My mother found it harder and harder to conceal the stampede of pledging bodies drunkenly stumbling through our front yard. That Christmas my parents told me that they wanted to move farther away from the college crowd. Despite all of my attempts to deter them the date was set for the end of the coming summer.

The beginning of that summer was like any other with its daisies and anthills and imaginary enemies. At some point I forgot what the end of the summer would bring. Joey never forgot. While I was joyful and carefree playing hide and seek under pine trees, where he always found me, the enemies were planning a sneak attack. Joey could not save me and I was lost to an enemy I couldn’t see coming.

Nina Age Fourteen:

He wouldn’t let me go. How can I let go when he won’t stop holding me down to the ground on the edge of a six hundred foot drop? How do I fall without being free of his hands underneath the pine tree? How do I forget how he said good-bye? I was glued to the ground by hesitation, my own desperation to trust again.

“That’s it! I need help. I can’t do it alone. I have to fall! It’s the only way out! I’m tired of being alone.” I pleaded with David.

David held out his hand to help me stand up again.

“That’s fine. I can help you, but only if you help yourself first! I will strap you to me and we will fall together but you have to push us off the cliff. It has to be your decision,” David informed me.

I clipped into David’s harness and he held me comfortably in his arms as I started to sob. David asked if I was okay and I simply said, “Yeah, okay. I’m ready to let go.”

Crumbling rocks cascaded down the cliff side as my feet slipped over the edge. I was falling through the air. I was weightless and freed from the ground.

By Amelia Liang

This is my drunk sestina.

I have to be drunk

to write anything of quality

or something like it. This blank page

is so terrifying. I’m glad for the drink

because otherwise I would write nothing

at all. I would think nothing

of myself, I wouldn’t be able to write this sestina

and now, with the drink

I’m uninhibited and a thousand thoughts come to mind and they, too, make me drunk

and full is the page

or half-full. I think of the quality,

the texture of your thighs, the qualities

you liked in me, now nothing

is coming to me with the tequila on the page

and unfinished is my sestina

despite all the images of your thighs and the curve of your hands, these make me drunk

in images of your breasts, your lips when you drink

lemonade, Belgian beer of quality

and you, off of nights on the porch, were drunk

of my lips on your knee, of moths in the light, of unnamed constellations, of nothing

these thoughts, these images make this sestina

on this no longer blank page

this filled page, a sheet, a page

of our history, we used to drink

together, not thinking of sestinas,

sonnets, equations, nail polish, just of the quality

of the beer, or wine, of nothing

and I, for one, would get drunk

off of the beauty of your face, our words, our silence, drunk

off of my words written on the pages

of my composition notebook, nothing

extraordinary, just a sip of the drink

you handed me on the porch, with those shadows under your cheekbones, something in that quality

of yours made me think, made me want to write this sestina.

And now I’m thoroughly drunk, writing your simple sestina

on this page, trying to create something of quality

and it isn’t nothing, but it’s just a drunk sestina. Hallelujah.

feeling,

feeling feelings.

feelings lost,

almost.

feelings

felt scared.

fear

fearing.

feeling

foreign

felt decompressed,

depressed.

dealing in sadness

sad feelings

deal the blues,

blues crooning,

how did this soul get all the way out here?

all the way out

here we are

needing fresh breaths of air;

these people are suffocating.

look at myself in reflections of glass

see if i’m really here

frustrated with all they did to us

all i’ve done to me.

now i’m stuck here,

all alone.

i swear they pulled me in,

trapped.

but i love my peoples.

tired of them in my mind

manipulating my vocab

my vernacular only viable

if it fits their vision.

controlled in their space,

yet its my mistakes that pile up,

how did mine?

how did mind?

keep in mind

the way they mind our minds

especially when my mind feels like

its been mined, pillaged, pilfered.

mind your mind,

i’ll mind my mine.

Aaron Coleman has spent the last 18th months in travels
around the Europe, Morocco, South Africa, and the United States in
hopes of writing a collection of poetry that seeks to highlight the
complexity of the black experience in the 21st century’s highly
globalized world. The project pursues its goal through a collection of
“spoken word” poetry as well as poems meant specifically for the page.