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.