HeartLines

ISSUE 4

Say You Still Need Me

By Ayasha Cantey

Sometimes I feel like you don’t tell me you f*** with me enough 
‘Cause the whole time, you were giving away what should have been my love 
– H.E.R. 
I was born to a woman who was more concerned about a man than her kids. At the age of 14, I was pawned off to a different set of parents to care for me. Supposedly this was a blessing…

Sorry is Always Enough

By Jenna Siuta

I am sorry. I am so sorry for all of the pain I have caused. But how much can I actually be sorry? They weren’t all bad memories. Some were good. Do you remember the smell of ice cream and popcorn filling the air as you walked down Main Street. Smiling and laughing as Grandma and Papa held hands for what it seems is the first time in years…

Trayvon

By Caleb Jean- Pierre

I saw him everywhere. I saw his face in my friends. I saw him when I looked in the mirror. I was eight. He was seventeen. My mother’s eyes, like those of the Sankofa bird, looking back at me. My father’s presence, like the whispering winds of the Black Mountains, watching quietly over me…

The Five Stages of Grief

By Madison Bloom

Everyone knows the 5 stages of grief. Someone dies, those close to them grapple with the reality of the loss and eventually make their way through the stages. You see it in movies and television shows, you read it in books, or sometimes you hear it at a funeral service. But what happens when you’re grieving your own death? And the person that killed you, stabbed you in the back and twisted the knife as much as they could, is the same person you thought you could trust. You’d go through each stage like I did if it happened to you, especially if that person was your father…

ISSUE 3

A Letter Back

By Mollie Lewis

When I was a freshman in highschool I wrote myself a letter to open four years later. My senior year I opened the envelope feeling like so much had changed… without anything really changing at all. I was older, and I’d be graduating soon. But I felt the same. I had the same friends and the same teammates. The same home and the same love. I always felt h a p p y even if days were bad. But after I opened the letter in January of 2020, It felt like everything was changing. If I could write a second letter for my past self, I would apologize. For the things she had to go through. And the things she still carries with her…

I Love You So Much, It Hurts

By Kaylee Shindel

I walk into my egg yolk yellow bathroom. The colors melt off the walls as butter. Sizzle against my retinas. Blinking doesn’t keep it at bay for long. The lights above the sink burn into my vision, and everywhere I look there are bright blue imprints.

Two sluggish orbs within my head struggle to keep up as I drive to work. An afterimage of traffic light still overlaps the traffic ahead on the highway The line of cars lights up like a glowing red snake, and I try not to focus on it…

Migraine

By R.J. Railton-Jones

I walk into my egg yolk yellow bathroom. The colors melt off the walls as butter. Sizzle against my retinas. Blinking doesn’t keep it at bay for long. The lights above the sink burn into my vision, and everywhere I look there are bright blue imprints.

Two sluggish orbs within my head struggle to keep up as I drive to work. An afterimage of traffic light still overlaps the traffic ahead on the highway The line of cars lights up like a glowing red snake, and I try not to focus on it…

Prima Colore – Sharon Zozo Brzozowski

Thanksgiving After

By Kelsey Donnelly

I miss your hands. Your fingers, though gnarled and twisted with arthritis, were always soft.
Gentle. Mothering hands, grandmothering hands.
They taught me how to whisk. Held my hand around measuring cups and sifted flour out of the bag.
Those hands, scarred, were capable only of love.
They held a potato in one and an old-fashioned peeler in the other, the words “and you must watch the blade,” carrying over the sizzle of water on the stove and the whirr of the ancient mixer in my mother’s hand…

ISSUE 2

What Is My Superpower? 

By Sara Anastasi

I am a perfectionist. I set an example of responsibility, independence, and ambition. In short, being the big sister essentially means I’m a complete nutcase. I’m anxious, I’m scared to fail. I was the self-sufficient, unproblematic child. I needed to be. In a household where two-thirds of the children are intellectually disabled, that other one-third child must be the
buffer; an invisible shield, a third parent…

Chess – Melissa Tagliarini

The Day Aina Changed

By Jenna Barbato

I grew up living in Honolulu. I walked on those beaches as I took my first steps. My Tutu Wahine squeezed my hand as I stumbled to the shoreline. Seventeen years later, the beach still feels the same. Same sand, same people, and the same town. Everything in this little town has stayed consistent, except for the waves. As I grew older, the waves got bigger. I went from jumping over the little waves that crash at the shore to swimming out on my board to catch the big ones before a storm…

Sunset – Camryn Mills

Please Respond

By Miriam Da Ponte

A friend of mine once confessed to me, “I’m not saying I’m going to drive my car into a post
myself, one of these days. But if I did get into a car accident and don’t make it? I’d be happy to
go, that’s for sure.”

Sometimes I think of when I was ten years old…

A Puzzle Deprived Of Its Last Piece

By Kacey Veiking

The future is a daunting unknown. We spend the early part of our lives collecting the pieces of our puzzle; this puzzle contains a combination of aspirations we have achieved and failures that may have occurred in doing so. What happens when a piece of that puzzle you have been holding so dearly disappears in an instant?…

ISSUE 1