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      April 22, 2017Slight of HandAlex Greenberg

      This is a landscape to be sketched & left uncolored.

      A boy stands at the crossroads of a ruined city, waving a bell without a whistle.

      Consider the tumbleweed of his hair, consider the muscles in his neck,

      white gossamer, tenuous like the brambles bearing the black walnuts of summer.

      Every rock is a headstone waiting to be named:

      Here lies the body of a newborn who saw only light in his life.

      A procession of townspeople tour their city as if for the first time

      peering into the cross-sections of houses where a shower head spews

      brown hibiscus over the bathroom tiles, where a boy’s bed has unmade itself

      & the bats locked in his sister’s diary have escaped & lodged their way

      into the empty light sockets of her closet. A mother spools the husks of a broken crib

      into the dress her daughters will wear when they drape the flag

      back over the city gate & sing the anthem of their bodies.

      This is all bound to happen again:

      the singularity gave us the bedrock for the bomb.

      from 2017 RYPA

      Alex Greenberg (age 15)

      Why do you like to write poetry?

      “Poetry lets me breathe when I feel stifled and serves as a vital outlet of expression for me. In poetry, there is a real sense of discovery that shocks me each time I sit down with a piece of paper and pen.”

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