THE WESTERN BORDER
POETRY
I don't think I have a favorite color
Mackenzie Hurd
The Door
Editor's Choice
contemplations
as sure as dark is night and day is light
Chloe Hendrick
There is no North in space.
Everywhere you stand
There just is
I forget that the sky begins here
Every time I take a step
I trod on the edges of space.
We forget that gravity is a centrifugal force
It pulls you in
Not down
All my quandaries are all-encompassing
Until I look at myself from another world. Then I remember
the
pale-blue-dot-ness of it all
There is no such thing as me.
I am an absurdly complex chemistry equation
That somewhere got out of hand
A bunch of pieces of matter that had the audacity to create a consciousness.
All I am
is atoms that happened to fall together in this shape.
Despite all this
I still wonder
In a spatial plane without direction or stability
“rhyme or reason” ruled entirely by chance
HOW did the atoms comprising “you” and “me”
Align in such a way in this space?
in this time?
Either way
for whatever reason (there isn’t any)
The galaxies that lent themselves to me care for yours.
Sara Güven
The Door
In an empty void far away,
There lies a door floating in silence.
Its veiled secrets I wish to say,
Yet it stares in defiance.
You see I made this door,
Through long suffering and toil,
Yet my attempts does it ignore
To open it and escape turmoil.
I float alone, with Andromeda’s gaze,
Hoping to escape and live life anew!
But there is no savior from this maze,
My fate condemned, in my view.
How did this revelation come about?
Doors are made to keep out!
Chloe Hendrick
tenth floor room 1008
Will Barton
The Space of Ages
Everything is Illuminated
Elana Morchower
As the Numbers and Voices were thrust before me, in neon-pale blindness, I floated in established depravity.
​
The Voices, again, pushing for their space. It was at once frigid and stifling. I waded among them, being prodded, jostled about as debris.
​
In the cold and the heat, the element writhed with itself, pulsating, hurting my eyes.
​
I could not move, nor drown in the tide. The abuse of our world was upon me, and I began to despair. I could not imagine a way out. My own mind was the limit that held me fast.
​
But suddenly, from within the waves, arms reached. Not to draw in or consume, but to support. I was lifted from the folds of the beast, dry and changed.
​
The harsh light fell away, and the stars painted motley prismatic worlds across the drear edges of my mind.
​
No longer restrained, the space of ages stood before me. I walked in the darkness, and rejoiced in it.
Collin Cortinas
To Birmingham-Southern College and the Liberal Arts
If all could see you as I do, my dearest love divine!
No more would men then scowl and smirk, rejoice at your decline.
Your worth is not in money earned, or parcels plotted clean,
But in your care to human growth and not your own esteem!
There is, of course, those in your halls who only seek to gain
The transient treasures of the world but slight the learned train.
Your legacy is far from clean, abound mistakes you’ve made.
The care that you still seek to gain to all have not been laid.
To those who face the hate and scorn engrained into your birth,
You still subject to them these sins; our bias walks the earth.
But still your envoys labor for the reason kind and true,
Of cultivating simpler minds and showing them the new.
If you are gutted from the world, your knowledge lost to time,
Then we have squandered what we are, our willful loss a crime.
Oh, pillar-stone of all our truth, of those yet still to come,
You carry all our hope and trust, and beat our mortal drum.
If you are thrown the precious rope, if knowledge wins the day,
Then let us vow to love and care, and find the righteous way.
Those who live in darkness may ne’er see her gracious glow,
But those now planted towards her rays still of her value know.
Let us still hope, in future years, still reared against the sky,
Our city’s western border shines, your love we still descry.
Our world may fall, no matter, yet for even if we fail,
We still will carry in our hearts, “to BSC, all Hail!”
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Untitled
Eli Grubbs
Collin Cortinas
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At 3 years old she was reading the newspaper
Eating Cheerios sitting at the dining room table
For breakfast.
She knows the feel of lamb’s ear in the backyard
knows the sound of metal smashing against a brick wall
She has a scar on her left cheek
courtesy of her sister.
She is stubborn
I am told she once sat in the principal’s office at preschool for half a day because
she refused to clean up after others
She is small.
She remembers the smell of her breathing apparatus
remembers watching Mulan
(she once sat in front of tv static for hours)
I am told she once put sticky notes up on her bedroom window
asking to be rescued
But I don’t remember that.
She is a child of joy
of stories
of dandelion crowns and honeysuckle
she was scared of her nightmares, scared of sleeping
All I can recall of her are glimpses, flashes
premonitions that attack
I fear my gravity was too strong
pulling her down down down
succumbed
Or maybe centrifugal forces just let her go
flung her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy
only heard in echoes
All I know is that I will spend the rest of my life searching
trying to get back to her
harsh realm
Chloe Hendrick
el amor de ser niño
Nicole Villavicencio-Garduño
Sara Güven
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I would jump into the night for you
swim through the swirling colors of the sunset
jump from star to star to find my way
the moment you ask me I will search the galaxy
until I can give you the moon
the stars hold all the answers and the beauty too
but then again, so do you.
Halle Morton
Land of Stories
I open the pages and am taken away
To a world of magic, dragons, and love
A journey for today
A story for tomorrow
Suddenly i am a bird flying high above
This land of stories i will keep inside
Til the end of time
