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• Fiction > Realistic Fiction
  The Run

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  "The girls would love it if you came to one of our summer practices," the email said. "Mondays and Thursdays at 6:30. See you at the Wall!" Her guilt won over her desire to languish in the heat of her room. Last year, as senior captain, she attended every summer practice sessi...
• Nonfiction > Personal Experience
  The Way You Don’t Exist

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  I saw you just 12 hours ago. The light outside was fading as I held your hand, feeling the veins pulse timidly, as though they were afraid to declare your survival as permanent. It was almost eight. We had a polite conversation, pretending that we could not hear the frantic countdown of your las...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Losing Pop

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  That was your seventy-eighth year, when things began losing you. Put your glasses on a cord keys on a chain but found no tether for your mind. You can’t remember walking hand in hand by the water the same way you used to lead me. Sixty years between your grizzled fingers and mine. It ...
• Fiction > Realistic Fiction
  A Wrong Turn

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster

  Many of our family heirlooms, like the clan that they belong to, are dysfunctional. There is the nineteenth century armoire whose hinges have rusted, lending its doors a vocal shriek whenever they are peeled open. The silver set is missing three forks and a spoon. Others have disappeared entirely...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Dead-Quiet

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  You were tranquil. The baby that never cried, I could imagine my mother saying, as she folded away the lopsided things she knit for you. A blessing I could see it in the nurses’ eyes as they held you, dead-quiet. They observed the skin that spread from my naked index finger to the...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  No Longer Your Bed

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  This is no longer your bed. Yes, you may argue that its weathered posts and swaying belly appear much the same. But you have not felt its hold in three months now. The way this bed cradles me is different than the way it held us. It has adapted to my turnings the diagonal trajectories of my...
• College
  Guide > College Essays
  The Holland Tunnel

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  People start asking some time around kindergarten. It’s the fault of those LL Bean monogrammed backpacks so ubiquitous to the elementary school experience. “What does the E stand for?” I asked one friend as she set down her Nacho Cheese Orange bag, emblazoned with CES. This launched a cl...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Anais

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Anais was meant to be like this shrouded in soaking-wet chiffon lurking in the fountain outside the Opera House at trois heures du matin. Her mother, father, a dry overcoat to bring her in from frigid waters remain in closed, ignorant captivity. Civilization, how she laughs at the very...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  25 Cent Keychain

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Your car door shuts, with a sense of urgency it has not held before. The sound of your boots stomping up the stairs,   once so familiar,   seems foreign for this time place and in conjunction with my last image of you   which remains imprinted on the insides of my eyelids   and dominates o...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Tangible

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  she knew that loneliness was something tangible dripping black and thick off the undersides of unstable bar stools leaving a sticky residue on the edges of razorblades left like water marks by the bottoms of vodka bottles and she could see it seeping from her eyelids when she looked at him ...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Something Monumental

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  She thought she was part of something monumental. Letting boys finger the still-tender bumps   on the edges of her newly inked tattoo. Their rough fingers explored its tangled lines then sought the soft places where she was unmarked. The kitchen counter was still sticky from when she...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Scales

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  We've been floating on this ocean Oh, for months now and I can feel the saltwater seeping in our spines. Is it to blame for the way our love turned dry and salty? Barnacles crust the tips of my outstretched fingers   the edges of my lips, hollows of my neck. The places you no long...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Burnished

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  He was just her slice of pie: marginally beautiful, burnished in the ever-fading brightness of summertime. When that broad mouth unbolted, when his voice belayed across the heightened acoustics of greenish standing water, her look cast down upon her pinkish wrinkled toes that squirmed ...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Tangled Lines

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  She thought she was part of something monumental. Letting boys finger the still-tender bumps on the edges of her newly inked tattoo. Their rough fingers explored its tangled lines then sought the soft places where she was unmarked. The kitchen counter was still sticky from when she ...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Your Turn

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  It's your turn to call. Last time I was the one that typed your name in the dark opened my window and ran across roads for you. I can still taste the asphalt on the backs of my hands scrubbed muddy stains from the hem of my jeans. But somehow I can only recall your face as it look...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Father Pattoa

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Lead us not into temptation Father Pattoa, you still know these prayers Under the limitless wrinkles of black robes, these words are ingrained upon your lungs. And, like the effortlessness of breathing, they are released without judgement. Your hands swallow hers like a eucharist. Minute, t...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Fallen Triangles

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Scraps of eraser cloud your graphing paper and you swiftly brush them away from your sharp graphite lines. The teacher says vectors like us can't coincide. But what if a triangle had three sides? But what if your lips were suddenly touching mine?...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Locker 126

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Colin remembers locker 126 which squats in red-painted security positioned at the finale of the dimly lit sophomore hallway. Exemplary only because it belongs to her. Pauses out of habit as though today were two months ago and he could still see himself reflected in her eyes. Back when 126 ...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Thalassa

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Do you recall that slippery cool feeling of pearls between your toes? When the rough bristles of oysters scraped the inside of your thumbs as you struggled to unfold their bony iridescence? You knew from that first day on the point when she was a multi-patterned kite spinning towards you ...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Oh, You Hopeful Rebels!

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Those forbidden lit-up cigarette tips line this hallowed hall like street lamps their light, illuminating the dark for all to see as the procession moves past in scuffed Converses hidden under uniformed pants. These are children of great men who now line to watch the procession beneath bus...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Gloria

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Oh, the days of Gloria. She licked the cream-colored crown moldings and announced that they tasted pink. That sure-footed stumbler weaving precariously between the garden gates scooped into the rusty cavern of a veteran wheelbarrow. Her laughter makes the timid fingers of baby's breath qua...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Like Lightning

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  I sought your heart in the darkness and finding nothing was content with your lips, your hands hushed phone calls in the young hours of morning. You turned from friend to lover to well, what are we now? Try to keep pace as I watch the scars form. They spread across your heart like l...
• Poetry > Free Verse
  Selfish, I Know

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  I kissed him only to try to remember the sensation of your lips on mine. It was nothing to the original organic you and I the backseat of your mother's car. Selfish I know but I want you a third time....
• Fiction > Realistic Fiction
  My Mother's Bowl

  

  By HollyG, Bedminster, NJ

  Pierce was the one who in the end broke my mother's bowl. It once sat high above the cold granite countertops in her kitchen, directly from the antique dealer. The artist's stamp on the bottom was visible for a brief second as my mother's birdlike arms placed it atop her custom walnut cab...