Recenter Press
  • About
  • Books
    • Rest of US by Richard Hamilton
    • evening primroses by Emma Loomis-Amrhein
    • Profit | Prophet by Patrick Blagrave
    • To Hold Your Moss-Covered Heart by Schuyler Peck
    • The Good House & The Bad House by Doe Parker
    • The Road Is Long & Beautiful by Terra Oliveira
    • And Still To Sleep by Terra Oliveira
    • An Old Blue Light by Terra Oliveira
    • Processes: A Meditation by Terra Oliveira
  • Journal
    • Issue Four: Fall 2020
    • Issue Three: Spring 2020
    • Issue Two: Fall 2019
    • Issue One: Spring 2019
  • Interviews

gap year

BY MAYA RENAUD-LEVINE.


My mother rides the broad shoulders of a silver motorbike
before she is my mother, wild dogs streaking behind like colored

Streamers. Sharp new words pulled from her ribboned
tongue land upright in the steaming ground. They quiver like

Arrows. Again the ribboned tongue enfolds burnt orange and fisted
peppers, imagine her face is knuckled chiffon white. Inside,

Tiles dance beneath her feet in tender quiet like nothing American,
like her first two girlfriends and their soft and petaled lips. Her mother

Pretends to hear nothing, nonetheless - the plate unfurls across the kitchen
floor. In these moments, my mother alone holds our green eyes like
​
Shards of fallen glass.​

Maya Renaud-Levine is a junior at Beacon High School, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She has a passion for podcasts, politics, singing and playing piano, and will never turn down a good crime novel. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in The WEIGHT Journal, Idle Ink, Eunoia Review, The Blue Marble Review and TRUANT LIT, and is a national winner of the American High School Poets Just Poetry!!! National Poetry Quarterly. 
  • About
  • Books
    • Rest of US by Richard Hamilton
    • evening primroses by Emma Loomis-Amrhein
    • Profit | Prophet by Patrick Blagrave
    • To Hold Your Moss-Covered Heart by Schuyler Peck
    • The Good House & The Bad House by Doe Parker
    • The Road Is Long & Beautiful by Terra Oliveira
    • And Still To Sleep by Terra Oliveira
    • An Old Blue Light by Terra Oliveira
    • Processes: A Meditation by Terra Oliveira
  • Journal
    • Issue Four: Fall 2020
    • Issue Three: Spring 2020
    • Issue Two: Fall 2019
    • Issue One: Spring 2019
  • Interviews