All poetry and fiction that was submitted by students in 8th through 11th grades (or the equivalent overseas) before February 1 is eligible for Prize consideration. And all submissions, explicitly for the Bishop Prize or not, are considered for publication in the Spring issue of the magazine.

Once again, the deadline for the Bishop Prizes is now passed. But, we are still reading and selecting work for our next issue. So keep sending your finest poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction prose, plays, and responses to our Features projects! It is an honor to read it.

It was the second time the kid let us go anywhere but McDonald’s, and after a bite into that twelve-dollar burger, she wiggled finger and thumb around in her mouth–my cloth-white napkin bloodied, a little window-gap in her smile.
Sophia Martins

The new-born lay on the table, wrapped in a sheet, still red and pulsing: a beating heart.
Allison Avila

She crept to the water’s edge, tenderly dipped her toes in, and yelped.
Adea Lennox

Her mother told her to make a list, said that she would feel better if she just got everything down on paper, but Martha Reamlin needed first to find paper and a pen, without which she couldn’t, just couldn’t.
Kaiyuh Cornberg

Inverted and soggy, the pie was unappetizing, but nonetheless an impressive feat for a five-year-old.
Courtney McCain

It is an acquired taste, the acid of dishonesty, and as soon as Harvey leaves the house, his spine and arms bristle with it.
Emily Kessler

Margaret Ackert heard the wet howls and first thought not of the newborn between her legs, but of Jack the tabby, who John had probably forgot to let in amid their rush the night before.
Kaiyuh Cornberg

It was something Virginia found in Mrs. Dalloway: a collection of words sufficing to enrapture, that collection of words I’ve here found sufficient as the door to a story, that she would buy the flowers…
Sophia Martins

Lost somewhere in the drunken countdown, in the blur of casual kisses, was Margaret–kneeling and searching for her other earring.
Courtney McCain

That classroom stayed barren and cheerless all year, and probably for all the years since; underneath its motley strew of sleek laminate and fallacious yellow stars are the same cold first-grade tiles, warping, now, with me.
Emily Kessler

Frightened and confused, Melvin realized that toga parties had nothing to do with Greek literature.
Courtney McCain

Every habitual repetition of task is in some way a comparison to the first time the action was conducted.
Casey Murtagh

First, stir together flour, baking soda, sugar — to preheat the oven to 350 degrees is the final instruction, after the mess is already blended.
Sophia Martins

Before I felt the strange white cold outside that morning, I thought the ground had swallowed up the grass and thrown up flour in its place.
Emily Kessler

They’d always wanted to, and finally, after their parents dozed off on opposite sides of the bed, they took the whipped cream can from the fridge and a feather from one of the couch cushions, then tiptoed upstairs, swirled the sweet foam into their father’s hand and tickled his nose with the feather.
Adea Lennox

We had just finished raking the last of the leaves when Jacob came running down the driveway, screaming, “I call jumping in first!”
Shelly Pires

He kicked and kicked and kicked, his foot searching for anything or nothing (no one knows) among the pastel blankets.
Renee Richard

The bride resented walking last, and with her father, no less.
Kaiyuh Cornberg

_________________

These “pencil shavings,” in conjunction with our new web site, were composed and compiled by The Blue Pencil Editors.

A call for submissions: Please feel free to submit pencil shavings for our next topic: Punch.

Remember: A “pencil shaving” is a single sentence—silly or serious, narrative or declarative, poetic or frenetic—written in response to a topic chosen by the editors, such as “greetings” and “baldness” and “octopus salad.” From the collections of shavings submissions, the editors compile the most interesting assortments and post them here (all shavings are subject to editing).

To submit, please visit our electronic Submissions Manager, and review the guidelines pertaining to Features Submissions. Please limit your submission to five offerings. We look forward to reading you. Thanks!

Welcome one, welcome all, to the newly-refurbished TBPO! The site that you are presently admiring is the product of much discussion and careful toil, and we are now quite pleased to rinse our hands of sweat, blood, and (joyful) tears to hand to you our wobbling little internet infant in its glossy new bonnet! It comes equipped with issues (mainly of the periodical sort, although those of the problematic variety should be met with open arms), a bold exterior replete with artwork; a vivid color scheme; a functional, clean display of published works; a new logo (observe: the dull pencil has been swapped for the shiny), and this: the hatchling Features Blog. Now, as you cradle this inexplicably beautiful gurgling thing in the ridges of your keyboard, between worrying whether or not it is going to short out your computer with its incessant larval emissions, this thought may occur: What exactly is a feature?

Allow Merriam-Webster to be your guide! A feature is defined as:

1. n. A prominent or conspicuous part or characteristic
2. n. Something offered as a special attraction
3. n. A prominent or special article, story, or department in a newspaper or periodical
4. n. The appearance of the face or any of its distinct parts
5. v. To give special attention to; display, publicize, or make prominent.

Number five is, in essence, our goal. The Features Blog will serve as the interactive ‘face’ of our site. Here, we will offer special attractions of sorts: various brief pieces of creative work, projects, and prompts. This will be a distinctive attribute of the new site and we hope to engage our readers, whether through examples of literary craft or through provocations and exercises for the writerly mind.

In summary, our Features Blog will comprise short posts that share some of the things that we, the editors, have found to be interesting or useful. The original four features from years previous are as follows: “Pencil Shavings” (single, well crafted sentences about a given topic), “Draft Board” (examples of and musings about successful edits), “A Good Read” (short elucidations of great works) and “Out Loud” (mp3 recordings of original readings and recitations). We encourage our readers to submit any of these to us for publication on this blog, so get to ’em—you all are the slick in this machine’s oil! We will also continue to post writing prompts, or “Pencil Sharpeners,” along with many miscellaneous tidbits to entertain and inform.

And now…

When bones ache they blossom,
saplings and flowers
outstretched toward the air in the crevices
between your knuckles. You can identify
the aged ones easily. They wear their wisdom
like a cloak, their skin covered by carpets
of blooming poppy fields,
gardens, dandelion clocks.
Their wrinkled wrists will be bare.
They will not need watches to know
when minutes blur into hours,
when hours coalesce into a year
and another weed spirals
from the crook of a forearm

As time drifts through months’ tendons,
you will know you are thirteen years old
when you wake with the smell of sunny grass curling
into your nostrils and a green shoot sprouting from
your kneecap, your fingernail, your clavicle—
Only then will you be able to correctly diagnose
that shuddering near your elbow or your right temple or
that twinge that rips through your bloodstream when you
look at her and taste salt
and only then will you know that
you are not spring’s gap-toothed child
anymore

When you lie down on a field
and you are grateful for that irritating strand
of her hair that brushes your chin because
it recalls her body sinking into the grass inches
from yours and when a weed tickles
the freckled small of your back
and when her fingers slip from yours and the mellow
rise and fall of slumber in her chest does not ease your worry,
you can remember the weed that will not die
scratching your shoulder
and when your bones ache the field’s blossoms
will whisper back
and you will know your organs are a part of something,
that your family is the bones of this earth,
that separation is not a concept, that
even the dragonflies are not alone

Part 1

1

Here is my mother: like the sort of girl a god might descend from heaven to woo for an hour. Here is my mother at Hampshire in fringed, tie-dyed clothing, in sandals, with her hair hanging like corn at her waist and her eyes green and bottled. She looks quiet; she looks like she is wanting for nothing in life but a little room for her and her dog—the orange-lustre mutt that follows her everywhere, the love of her life.

2

Here is my mother at nineteen: she’s forgotten her Spanish, eyed death, fallen in love with girls and men. She’s seen too many lusts wash over her on the street; seen her brother lose his mind in hiccups, with momentum, with a strange diligence; visited him in the hospital even though it was like paying her respects to a sinister politician. She’s been found walking on the shore when the news arrived, when her unease came undone, when she began to stash her regrets in the notches of her ribs. She’s listened to the train he awaited, shrieking closer in her mind, like a rabid animal, like a ruthless god over the tracks, and waited for it to grasp him.

3

Here is my mother: she is nineteen, and she has seen the world with the orange dog at her heels. Here she is before India, before she tastes curry, before she prays, before she decides how she’s going to get what she’s already decided to want. Here she is before she meets my father, before she leaves my father, before she loves me. Here she is looking as though she has emerged, wearied and more beautiful, beginning too late to hold on to the things she once wished would unfetter her.

Part 2

1

There are three kittens on the beach in Gloucester on my mother’s birthday: a rust-brown, brassy baby and a white twin with perfect posture and half-closed eyes, mewling. A last dark lovely, tiny, curled like a shell among the green glass of crushed bottles lies between the rocks, too quiet. The month is May. It’s a heartless dawn and the ocean roils. She’s here because there’s nowhere she wants to be, and the sea belongs to no one.

My mother hates cats. She hates their regal nature, the way they stare at her with a calm fierceness and an unparalleled dignity that dwarfs her pride, the way they make her orange dog crazy. But the kittens are sacks of skin, are dying. She takes them under her shirt, swaddles them between her skin and the cotton, carries them into her rattling car and turns up the heat while they tremble and burrow into the warmth of her. And she has stolen something from the sea.

2

China is the snow-kitten of the two my mother finds on the beach, with the same scarce green eyes. She hides among the plates in the cabinet, sleeps in the cold ash heaped in the fireplace. She’s regal in a way that makes my mother jealous; she thinks that if she could look at men with that imperious vanity, they might keep their promises.

When China runs away during a December snowstorm, savage, brilliant, a whitewash on the paddocks, my mother prays to herself: oh slight soul, teach me how to hold on to this. China is another snowflake in the woods. My mother loves the leeching of color and she hates the loving of it and she misses China, she misses her arrogance, she misses her greed. Her own eyes are withering to blue; some mornings she wakes and there is another, older soul caught in the net of her skin. She prays: oh slight soul, teach me how to hold on to this. She doesn’t know what to do with the beauty, and she doesn’t know what to do with the blue.

3

My mother tells me she is selfish: I wanted you for myself, not for you. She says it as though it’s an excuse. Don’t ask me if you can have the things that you want, she says; you’re mine.

When I’m sixteen—when I’m deciding what I want and whether to blame my mother for wanting me for herself—I whisper to myself the pulsating words: I am volatile and wild and young, and you wanted me, and you can’t take it back now.

I hold the line with me, close, tied to my wrists. I love her, but I am her daughter. I have always loved cats; I admire their august glares, their haughty ears, the things that breathe arrogance to my mother.

After China, my mother feeds the cats that sleep in the barn. She offers them milk and invites them into the house, sometimes. One of them is brown and glossy, and we name her Sophia. When her belly swells with kittens, we nestle her in a cardboard box by the fireplace. My mother sees the babies emerge pink, blind, as fragile as those on the beach were. The kittens are already volatile and wild and young. I am grateful, sometimes, for my mother’s selfishness. She regards me often with a tired, bemused comprehension, like she remembers, like she knows what words I keep close to me.

Part 3

1

In the bungalow when I’m little the rain leaks through the roof during real storms, April storms so purple and fierce that the walls shake. We put out buckets, bottles, pans; I sit in the pit of the sofa with an umbrella held between my knees and a burnished circle of water like a halo around me. We make the rounds to empty the heavy drums, thick with scraps of the sea, and sometimes the house smells like salt and old wood. I place saucers of milk on the floor for the cat.

My mother’s eyes are still green. The blue falls across them like a film. She still doesn’t eat curry, can’t remember her Spanish, lets the dog trail her feet around the house. She looks like the sort of woman a god once descended from heaven to woo for an hour and who has been left, like a spilled skin, bereft, like a woman who has been loved and never so happy as in that moment. She has the eyes of someone who has screwed the stopper of herself on fast so that everything she once loved might not be swept out by the inexhaustible thoughts she has of the dog, of the new baby boy named after her brother, of the umbrellas and the bottles to be emptied.

But she begins to like the way the water beats as she turns the blue bottles upside down and lets out the ocean: like an artery, like something desperate and alive.

2

When the new house is done, we tear down the bungalow with the leaky roof. We put the umbrellas and the bottles in a closet in the new hall that smells of varnish and egg yolks. The cat wanders through the weeds by the steps and seems wary of the space, of the width of the unfurling floors. My mother watches the bungalow coming down, tumbling in on itself, wrinkled and broken by the cranes. My brother and I swim in the cement ravine when it fills with green water.

3

After Hampshire, my mother worked on an egg farm. As a child, I imagine her mowing fields with a long spoon and scooping up blue-freckled eggs in smooth rows. Sometimes, they crack, and the liquid yellow spills out in rivers.

My mother buys horses and a trailer, and she paints Moon Owl Farm onto the side of the truck. While the men are hammering nails into the shingled barn, my mother stands in the center, between the rows of stalls and the fresh bales of hay tied up neatly in the corners, and she smells the wood shavings and the paint. There is so much here that belongs to her, that acquiesces to the pads of her thumbs.

She clears the tall grasses and the wildflowers to lease the horses. The pines still tower at the fringes of the paddocks. In January, we tread the truck over thick ice and shave a skating rink, pitted and choppy, but a glory when I slip across it in boots. Spinning spinning. This, I think, is where one might be wooed by a god. Oh slight soul, teach me how to hold on to this.

Wrapped in charcoal blankets,
Sky sisters slumber. The eldest
Sighs a breath of winter wind
Making mortals shiver far below.
Escaping her raincloud bed,
The middle sister sleepwalks
In a nimbus nightgown. Fretful,
Restless, the youngest flings
Her arm, shatters stars that spill
To earth as silver raindrops—
Celestial gifts to lonely lands.

*This poem is inspired by the ancient Chinese legend “The Cowherd and the Celestial Weaver Maiden.”

                    After Louise Erdrich

That was the winter
your body grew a new geometry—
collarbones surfaced like
flying fish. Or it was like
standing by the ocean, watching
the tide of your skin pull out.

We saw the world as it was: reeling,
hollow, and cylindrical. Like an
empty stomach. We were peppered
with prayers and robes, ravenous.

One morning, I caught you
there on the bathroom floor,
your eyes praying, but more full.

You looked up. Your spine was a bridge.
Air crossed it to the windowsill.

You looked up. Your spine was a bridge.
Your longing crossed it, backwards from your lips,
scuttling to the windowsill and into the sky.
Our skin was tough, consumed by shivers.
It was dough, unbaked and
falling.

That was the winter
I dreamed of empty churches.
We ate prayer verses
straight from the book,
scriptures borne on moonlight.

The cars come as if in a parade. We wait, quiet in our line of metal, stopped on the pavement where the gas station empties into the intersection. Cars form lines coming in and going out, and sometimes, when the traffic is heavy, we sit in a sort of limbo between sidewalk and street. This is not the only station–there are two others; the three of them command three street corners, angled toward each other in a triangle.

We cycle through the station as if in a slow ritual. Roll down the window, watch the fuel gauge’s pointer rise toward the limit as the car drinks. I saw, once, a man who drove away too soon. He stripped the nozzle from its pump and managed one hundred feet before stopping, a rubber hose trailing on the sidewalk from his car.

The same attendant is there most days. He sits alone in his booth, humming to himself and arranging the cigarette packets on the wall, numb to the heavy, sweet smell of gasoline that makes me bury my nose in my jacket, a fabric muffler. We know him thirty seconds at a time, in conversations over the throb of gasoline hoses; we watch him as he presses buttons with practiced fingers, counts change laid out deliberately along the lines of his hand. For some reason, we do not ask his name (there may have been a pin on his red tunic, a “my name is” scrawled on a name tag on his shirt). In the imposed uniformity of a gas station attendant, he never changes; he does not exist beyond the confines of his yellow-roofed station, without his jacket blackened by exhaust and his unwavering frown.

This man with his thick, musical accent, this familiar stranger, occupies a strange place in our lives. We know nothing of his children, his family; we do not know his favorite food or color or song. In the booth where he sits, slouched before a weak fan in summer or blowing on cupped hands in winter, we catch glimpses of the scattered memorabilia of a life: dog-eared color photographs of smiling children, a scuffed leather wallet, a set of golden keys dangling from a graying rabbit keychain. All these things lie just beyond the cash register, in the open, alone, pieces of some identity beyond what we have been shown. We see these and say nothing, form quiet questions and watch as the little columns of numbers on the gas pump flash higher at dizzying speeds. We ask only about his business. How is it today? How is it going? Over time we come to imitate the way he shakes his head and lets his mustache droop with his frown, saying Bad, bad, always it is bad. Behind the tinted veil of our car window we smile, because a line of cars leads into his station and gas costs $4.00 a gallon, and we laugh, certain that his job is more than assured.

One day in winter, when our voices hang white ribbons in the air, we arrive to find the station closed, a large plastic “For Rent” sign plastered over the station name. What remains of the gas pumps is wreathed in yellow tape. The booth in the back is empty, our attendant gone. We look a while, shake our heads, wonder at this stripped skeleton, every nozzle and hose removed,  and the little booth bare of cigarettes and candy and scattered coins. Others like us, stopped by the station in the same hesitant disbelief, form a line parallel to the curb. The cars stand a moment, and then turn into one of the stations across the street, where there is an unsmiling man who splashes dirtied water across the windshield and wipes it away with a rag in hard rhythmic strokes that leave graying streaks across the glass. We notice, as he moves lazily from car to car, that he dips and wrings his rag into the same one-handled can, so that the water is dyed gray with the dust of customers. As we wait in our car, listening to the tap of the rubber hose against the car as it jerks a little with the flow of gas, this new attendant stands unmoving at a measured distance. In this station, there is no booth for the attendant, no photographs of children or family on bare, whitewashed walls.

When the pump clicks off, the attendant moves brusquely toward us, leans over, and sticks a hand through our open window. He lets a plastic name tag brush against the roof of our car, and we remember our routine, our familiar stranger. “How is it today?” we say weakly. “How is your business?” He looks past us, perhaps without hearing, and then takes our bills and our tip swiftly, not saying a word.

I.

There are two bowls of candy in your grandparents’ house: Dove dark chocolate, an endless supply, and hard candies—apple cartoons on the wrappers, cola-flavored, sticky. The occasional peppermint. Pungent, mature tastes—these are not for children.

You snatch a cola-flavored candy with a thief’s dexterity and keep up the act when you pad in thick socks to the trash to spit it out. Where are all these candies from? your mom asks, gesturing to the bowl.

Grandma, owl-eyed: Oh, taken from different restaurants—most are from Francesca’s, you know, that Italian place, the one on Milwaukee, in Lincolnshire. Once Upon a Bagel, too, though it wasn’t very good the last time we went, was it, Jack? Isn’t that right?

All you can trust are the peppermints.

Two peppermints later, your mom sees a wrapper you didn’t throw away: Aren’t you full? Your grandparents just made you bagels and lox. Fresh lox, too (it’s very good, your grandma interjects, from this place we just discovered, it’s at Sunset), and chives and onion cream cheese.

There isn’t much to do at your grandparents’ house, besides eat. Some reason or another is manufactured every year to fly over to this Chicago suburb and then an obligatory day or four is spent sinking into quilted sofas, your sister nodding off with her head on a tasseled pillow meant only for decoration, your own thoughts feeling muffled, indistinct, imprecise. Miracle on 34^th Street will be on television, or Grandpa will listen to classical music, begin rambling incoherently structured stories in between movements and not finish them.

II.

He’s bent over at a forty-five degree angle, Grandpa is, from his years as a truck driver delivering food. Went in for therapy once, but the doctor said it was too late. He can still do things though, sort of. Yesterday he made you hot chocolate for breakfast (bagels and lox then, too) and you drank it all while your stomach protested and then he asked if you wanted more. He was holding the Swiss Miss box and you watched his shaking grip, his tenuous hold on gravity’s law, and you just couldn’t. No, you said. No, it’s okay. A few moments later, your dad said, He likes doing things for you, your grandfather.

Even so, nothing can stop you from stiffening even your bruised pinky toe, tensing until it seems even the acid chyme in your stomach has halted mid-twist as he trembles; today you pass on hot chocolate and go for orange juice. Grandpa comes to pour it and by some understated, everyday miracle every drop reaches home inside of the glass.

III.

You watch the Tropicana carton quiver as your grandpa says, You know, I squeezed this all myself, fresh… When you drink it all and he offers to pour more, you say thank you and pour it yourself—watch out for the cuff of your sweater, says Grandma, you don’t want any smuts on it, no cream cheese or anything. After you finish you see Grandpa has been standing in the same spot the whole time, near the speckled marble counter where bagels are burning. His wide brown eyes are round and steady, the vestige of a military man who could stand at attention, and he’s watching you, a look of something bereft entrenched in the wrinkles of his face.

                            for Erin

I’ve started to believe in hieroglyphics
Holding a slab of stone in my hand
Putting what I mean to say deep within
An indisputable rift so that when it’s all over
People know where I stood
And it was not here

That story about the woman collecting bones
I see her when I think of now
A moment I’ve been trapped in forever
Reimagining it until I am some amethyst
Some sharpened piece of quartz hung around a neck
To protect a drunk from intoxication

Beauty is often tainted glass or a mineral
Scrounged from the retinas of sand
A severed nerve left on its own to be recreated
This is why the things I saw were beautiful
They made no sense
They made no sense

And I swear papyrus cut my eyelids
With antique words whose resonance was shrill
Enough to pierce my eyes, pulverize
Things mean so much more once they’re dead
Their sarcophaguses open music boxes
Songs start to come from them

I emerged as a headless figure
Strung across a clay vase holding ashes
Instead of Mediterranean flowers
I saw interpretations of dreams
How a music box breaking meant that I
Would remain amethyst

And cut by papyrus
Alone with the woman collecting bones
I see her everywhere
She will never find all those pieces
But it is beautiful because
It makes no sense

She keeps looking and therefore
Has everything in her hands