Your hopeless little tragedies

Spill so hopelessly on the floor.

The ones that take over all the attention,

The ones so goddamn impossible to ignore.

The not so gentle news

Is burning away, all this trust once built

Standing stiffly in an elevator,

An automatic mouth swallowing,

The girl who so surely stepped inside,

When she was little,

Hoping for a ride.

words

like amorphous chunks of metal

they rest on a shelf in my brain

and beg to be molded

I long to hold them in the

fire of my skull

till they are soft and malleable

Jaden Gragg is 14 years old. Her writing submissions received the highest marks from our team of young adults. The poise and focus displayed in her writing is simply suburb. Jaden has three poems and one prose poem published in this issue.