Chelsea Alonzo
12TH GRADE
ARCHITECTURAL ENGLISH
I send him a poem.
My poem.
He starts his rhetorical questions.
Why this? Why that?
I answer a few.
Just to be nice.
The questions are getting unmanageable, not because they’re personal,
But normal people just swallow it and make of it what they want.
But he’s a different kind of different.
I say some things are better unanswered or sometimes it’s best not to know the answer.
His ears seem to be enclosed by his own circle of imagination.
So he’s not hearing a thing.
I stare at him as he reads my poem for the fifth time.
His face blank, zero expression.
Maybe he’s designing his own blueprint of the poem.
What he wants it to be. But that’s the point.
A poet writes for a reason.
That’s me.
The audience listens for a reason.
And it’s up to the wonders of the mind to make a sculpture of it.
He looks up and I say,
“You’re the architect and I’m the writer.”
HPAC YOUNG WRITERS REVIEW
BETWEEN GENERATIONS
Summer vacations for me are quite disparate from my mother’s summers in
Ecuador. Nowadays in the United States,
summer is all about finding programs
and educational camps to keep occupied. However, life during my mother’s
childhood and early teenage years was
quite different. She spent three marvelous months in contact with nature.
She went to school in the city while my
great-grandparents lived on a farm far
from where my mom studied. But as
soon as my mom’s vacation started, my
great-grandpa was there waiting to take
her back. During the months of February, March, and April, my mom along
with her cousins were able to experience
not only the cultivation of major grains
but also sharing time with domestic animals. You might be thinking dogs and
cats, but she saw more than that: from
cows and horses to chickens and pigs.
The days for my mom started
as soon as the rooster sang its morning
hymns. Chickens would come down
from the trees single file, following my
mom for their daily breakfasts while the
hens with chicks looked for