Hidden between the mattress, written in coded linguistics are scratched words etched onto faded pages of fabric journals. And in those pages, wrapped around thousands of words burns a screaming soul—wanting, waiting to be released.
Souls Written Pages is the lyrical journey of thirteen teenagers as they venture through, around, and between words creating their own written path. These pieces carve out short vivid scenes from the ever evolving lives of young adulthood. This
heart-wrenching piece of literary work will bring back memories that you thought were lost in a sea of growing older.
2005 Teen Poets listed by their Pen Names:
Secrets, Mellon, Isis, Deep Thoughts, Liz, Cocoa, Meek Meek, Monica, Pasqualina, Irene, Karinka, Jennifer, & KaShon
Strokes of Gray,
They’re Written
Cursive letter, what do they mean?
Strokes of gray, they’re written
Drowning in the alphabet
In the ink, it’s breathing
Every moment, such a skill
Craving for a moment
Thoughts are blank
Thoughts are filled
Scattered in motion
Scattered instilled
Everyday, they’re spoken
From life to life to generations
One misunderstands
One miscalculates
Some of love, some of hate
In a painting, a poster, a
photograph
What is provoked? What is the
meaning?
Words expressed in a million
letters
In paintings or of photographs
Message waiting to be
delivered
They'’re written against at last
Hidden meanings, disarrayed
Loss of passion, seems
distanced and far away
Look closer, read between
the lines
Strokes of gray, they’'re
written
With your eyes obtain it, as if it
were real
Take it in with passion, as if it
had a soul
As one person who loves you
Looks past your outer beauty
The same as for something
Look at its inner beauty
Misunderstood, taken for
granted
So from it we depart
Yet, how can we, when it lives in us?
A part of our everyday life
Enjoy its artistic structure
Acknowledge the retrospect
for life
Breathe it and grasp it
Live it and hold on to it
Seek as to find
Remember as to never forget
It holds such creativity
It means more than what it
seems
To the artist, to the writer
It holds more than memories
Gray and black, colorful or not
These are bigger than life
itself
They allow us to communicate
-Jennifer
Impact Of Me
I am like a tsunami of thoughts you could never escape
My comments are so intoxicating that you cannot stand,
let alone speak of the knowledge I have within.
The eye is the center which is
an ocean of secrets that you
could never cross.
The core of me lies within my
mind that is full of tunnels that I have not even entered.
Twisted things that not even the heart can take or afford to lose them in thought.
You cannot run from it which is my thought to you.
Stay right where you are and let my tsunami pass through.
-Secrets
"The unprecedently swift and determined approach of Writer's Lair has tapped and channeled a well of creative energy among Goucher College's writing students...[Writer's Lair] has discovered and developed a remarkable body of work, and put it
before a larger audience than it could otherwise have hoped to enjoy. The least of the works presented here shares in that surge of creative vigor--the best of them will be hard to forget."
-Madison Smartt Bell
Into Our Clothes is a collection of poems and short stories written by a talented selection of students attending Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
A Quiet Night In Mexico
My mother, father and I sat for a very long time, mostly abstaining from conversation and food, making eye contact with one another only by accident. We chewed on the silence, picking its sharp bones
from our teeth. An entire meal with only the sound of boards bending and creaking against the winter cold, of clearing throats, of crickets chirping, and of forks scraping against plates as they rearranged small piles of spaghetti; those
millions of sounds you notice when nothing you can say is appropriate.
I noticed maybe a dozen cookbooks were scattered across the kitchen counters, books with the names of countries I’d never been to printed across their covers.
Most nights, the smell of seared monkfish or steaming moussaka wafted out of the kitchen accompanied by loud jazz music, and my mother’s singing, if she thought no one could hear. Tonight she served undercooked spaghetti with store
bought pasta sauce and scooped small forkfuls into her mouth. She seemed to forget that the pit in her stomach did not allow room for things like food.
My father gulped down a few mouthfuls, then pulled his cheeks up in a fake smile, making his
jaw labor hard enough that I could almost hear it tremble and groan, like an old wooden bridge sagging under its own damp weight.
I sat with a hand resting on my knee under the table, hiding the not-so-healed cuts across my
knuckles. I could never stop picking at the scabs. My mother was looking at me, waiting for me to force down even one bite, but I just kept absentmindedly pushing around my heap of undercooked pasta until it got cold and I could dump it in the trash,
go to my brother’s room and just sit. Maybe hit play on his CD player and blast whatever was in there.
My brother was in a hospital fifty miles away, sucking down clear fluid from a tube sticking out of of his arm. Every hour or
so his eyes would start fluttering and he would moan louder and louder until a nurse came into the room and pushed a button, shutting him up for a while longer with the dull push of some drug I couldn’t name. A hospital blanket, stiff and
uncomfortable as a ragged sheet you picture dark-skinned men sleeping under in third world countries, hid his broken and scarred leg. Nothing covered his fractured skull.
A doctor who would forget my brother’s name
as soon as he took off his stethoscope had come into the room with his latex-gloved hands clasped in front of him to speak with myself and my parents. He laid one sterile hand on my brother’s thin shoulder and told us that
there was nothing they could do about the swelling in his brain, that all they could do was to wrap a line of tape around it and tell everybody to stand back.
“Right now, you just need to be patient.”
I could have killed him,
I think. But instead I nodded and said thank you.
He threw his latex gloves in the trash before he left the room.
My brother had looked as if he might have only been asleep, but he flailed as much as his body could muster, drowning in the
broken dreams that tore apart his sleep with the sound of broken glass and screeching tires.
A tear fell from my mother’s cheek into her spaghetti. My father didn’t move to lay an arm over her shoulder; he never said that everything was going
to be all right or not to worry, and it wouldn’t have been right if he did. Why even open our mouths? We had all been there when the doctor said, “He might not make it out of this without some brain damage.”
You might have a
fucking vegetable for a brother, was all I could hear. Just two days before, I had stepped off a plane to be picked up by my father and brought to Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. The day before that, I talked to my mother, a million
miles away, from a payphone by the side of the road in Cuernavaca, a Mexican city built out of plastic and Polaroids for vacationing Americans.
I can’t remember really what my mother said to me that night, but I listened as if I were taking the pulse
of every word that she said and found them all hollow...
-Dan Bornstein
