Here, Youth

A conversation with, by, and for the intangible being of Youth.

Here the beach is a silent cacophony,
like the composition of a forest.

Here the ocean breaks with a riptide repetition. 
Here the beach is a silent cacophony,
like the composition of a forest. 
Here the mountain erodes in quiet stupor. 
Hear the growing vastness of absolution. 
Hear the record spin and sing. 
Here the birds are nesting in soft dirt. 
Hear my beating heart. 
Hear the rhythm of my rivering veins. 
Here the honored rebirth of expectation. 
Here the sculptor of your graveyard garden. 
Here the sea, like a comatose monolith. 
Hear my girlhood. 
Here Youth. 

Youth blames infinity —
wanton, waiting —
from lighthouse lengths,

fog flashing, alive with rain,
the quiet finality of remembrance
growing,

as Youth prays for forever 
(like laughter reborn 
from love, it tastes of lemon-

ade, stolen heaven)
tendrils reaching farther, Youth
almost Olympic, alas

her naivety whistles her home
to the womb, skeletal
hum — deep, vast —

still beating in her mind,
while Eve watches the skies,
unknowable as desire,

which create like lips,
of a girl in love, or lost
tempest, to drink in humanity.

Genre / Medium

Poetry

Topic

Coming of Age Self-Reflection

Process

This piece was written while I attended the Kenyon Review Young Writer’s Workshop. The prompt was to address the unaddressable: I chose to converse with Youth. Before I began writing, we read poems from Santiago Vizcaino and Paula Bohince. This poem takes after their writing.

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Fiction

Alice Rosenberg

Alice Rosenberg is a poet, playwright, and performer from Manhattan, NY. She has adored writing for as long as she can remember and recently attended the Young Writers Workshop with the Kenyon Review. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards, the annual Girls Write Now anthology, and The Empty Inkwell Review. When her Muji pen isn’t buried in her red, soft-cover, Moleskine notebook, you can find her stage managing, producing, and directing with her high school theater company, interning at a literary publishing agency, or reading Virginia Woolf.