The Cloud 9 Anthology
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Mi Cielo* The Cloud 9 Anthology *My sky, my heaven, my darling © 2017 Michael Riedell’s UHS Creative Writing Class All rights remain with the individual authors Layout & Design by Blake More & UHS Creative Writing Class Funding for Poet Teaching and this anthology was provided by Mendocino County Office of Education California Poets In The Schools with help from the California Arts Council For information about California Poets InThe Schools, contact: CPITS 2131 19th Avenue #203 San Francisco CA 94116 415-221-4201 www.cpits.org Mi Cielo The Cloud 9 Anthology Foreword Mi Cielo: my sky, my heaven, my beloved. Which is it? Or is it three titles in one? And then there’s the question of who or what is being referred to. Are we pointing up into the air--to the blue or to the heavens beyond? Maybe the heaven is the class we were in for a year--our laughter and discussions and then silence of poems and stories being written. Or maybe the beloved is art and literature and poetry itself. As is often the case, the questions here may be more valuable than any single answer. For now we can say let the answer be that famous fourth multiple- choice response: D. All of the above. There is an upward motion to writing or creating art, a rising, a transcendence--to use the name we almost went with for our book title. That’s what this book is about, that’s what these pages demonstrate. The class was Cloud 9. We drifted here and there, blowing one day east and another north-west. The culmination of our collaboration is this: a book, a volume, a testament to our efforts, our insights, our revelations. We hope it lifts you. MR 4/17 Table of Contents Foreword Tobi Anderson Amanda Bednar Taylor Bray Seth Butow Jonathan Carey Bailey Caudillo Alejandro Corona Vargas Dylan Deguzman Samuel Duval Mateo Flores Jessica Hernandez Kiley Holmes Vanessa Ilar Dax LeBlanc Odalys Mendoza Gonzalez Malayah Meredith Presley Miller Nelsen Emily.Moroney Joseph Munguia Brawley Parker Hailey Porterfield Karamia Putman Jazmin Ramirez Savana Robinson Knimya Shaw Indigo Stewart Sasha Wilkins Alexis Yates Robert Yonts Michael Riedell Biographies Tobi Anderson Smile For The Camera I had never noticed that she never smiled, not until the day she showed up on my doorstep, grinning from ear to ear. I had never thought to look past the quick tilt of her lips she always gave or how her eyes could never seem to meet mine. All the little signs of her facade had slid over my head like water. I didn’t want to believe that she wasn’t happy, that all of her jumping around and crazy words were just there to distract us all from the true problems. To take the spotlight off of what was underneath. I had pretended for so long. Pretended that the one time I saw her cry was on one of her birthdays, surrounded by the shards of multiple glass objects, was because her mom simply forgot. I had pretended to be her friend. That I wasn’t keeping her at arm’s length because I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know what was behind that smile she pulled off so well. More than anything I pretended that everything was alright. But when she stood there smiling-really smiling-I knew all my pretending had to stop. 6 SHOCK THERAPY Twelve Years She was only five, still new to the world, but so old. She had yet to face up to the big kids that pushed her down, had yet to to fill her own childhood with the correct amount of cruelty it seemed to demand, had yet to taste the words adults told her to never repeat on her own lips. She knew many things however. Like how to laugh, how to play...how to stay away. She was only eight. Too many people had left, all without a goodbye. She saw red in the eyes of her father and tears in her mother’s. She knew how to tell mocking laughter from the real kind and when to hide. She knew how to pray and how to expect nothing. She was only eleven. Crimson coated the snow. A ball laid nearby, forgotten by the frightened children. Blood dripped from her nose and swelled up like a plum. She tasted it. She now knew why red was a lovely color in her house. She was only fourteen. The boys clustered together and hissed like snakes. Their mean jokes and tear bringing remarks made her bleed like that snow covered day long before. They claimed to be joking, she claimed to be laughing. People could be so cruel. She was only seventeen. She watched the only boy she loved be buried and held tight to her dying mother’s hand. Soon, her mother would be gone too. Than her father. She couldn’t wait. THE CLOUD 9 ANTHOLOGY 7 Lives of Many I’ve been a wide-eyed, rebellious child. A child who lifted rocks and pushed back seas in search for their next adventure. I’ve been a monster, a deep sea creature that lurked under the ocean floor and waited. Sometimes, I waited forever. Sometimes, I didn’t have to wait very long. I’ve been a story with millions of other stories hidden deep within my pages. Pages with their own passage ways and dark tunnels that would take a lifetime to find the end of. I’ve been wise, so wise that the world was so utterly dull in my eyes. So wise that the only time I could pass for living was when my eyelids were closed, and I was with my wild imagination, an imagination that could beat my strong realities any day. I’ve been a star, so far up in the sky that I was dead by the time my light reached the eyes of some praying child. I’ve been who I am now, a stranger in a sea of familiar faces, wandering the Earth until it is my time to be something else. Something greater. Something worthy of this world. 8 SHOCK THERAPY 2am Inspired by L.S. It’s 2:36am and I’m still awake because 2am isn’t anything like in the movies. 2am isn’t for those star-crossed lovers who lie under the starry night sky, dreaming for better days and warm embraces, all hoping for a better tomorrow that will never come. It’s for the poets, the writers, and dreamers who can’t sleep because their minds are alive with marvelous words and declarations for someone who’s not there, who’s never going to be there and probably was never there in the first place. It’s for the alcoholics drinking themselves into oblivionation and the smokers who try to hide it all behind some false glaze and a high laugh, all just to forget someone who left without even a first thought to begin with. 2am is for the lonely, the ones who are in love with the loved but are not loved in return. It is a time for us, the damaged souls, so we can trick ourselves into believing we can just get right back up and start anew. But that’s exactly what it is my friend, a trick. One that starts to wear off in the early hours of our dreaded mornings. It’s then we wait for our next 2am, our next fix. Like clockwork. We go ‘round and ‘round until the batteries run out and we can’t find it in ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. Because what would be the point? We’ve given up by then, we always do in the end. We’re cowards, every single one of us and although most won’t admit it, the truth still lurks in the shadows. It sits on our shoulders, whispering out our little fears into our hearts all day long. There it checks in, it sits and waits for the right moment. For an opportunity to cut deeper inside of us. But then again, it’s our own thoughts and insecurities that cut deeper than any blade ever could, than any deadly whisper. Our thoughts do the most damage. They rip us apart from the inside out, evil little smile on their nonexistent faces as they watch us put on a show for others. It’s like a circus show for them, one they know the ending of and somehow that makes it all the more better. Our thoughts are our demons. And frankly, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Some don’t even want it to stop, minds set on believing they deserve the torture, the pain. I admit to being one of many who are convinced they deserve to be buried in the dark, trapped in a water filled tank with all my secrets, to slowly starve off of them. After all, monsters don’t get second chances, right? THE CLOUD 9 ANTHOLOGY 9 Loving More I’m a girl who loved a boy who didn’t love himself. Perhaps that was my first mistake. I had believed that I could love hard enough for the both of us. I loved him more than myself and in doing so I had broken my deepest promise, the promise to never love anyone more. I had seen what loving more did to my mother. I had watched as she loved my father more, so much in fact that she let him leave bruises on her skin as if they were butterfly kisses.