Teen Writers

Lack Luster Reaction of Getting Who You Want/Crushing

By: KJ Royalty

Beauty undefined, 

Just to be redefined, 

Light Skin, 

Natural, 

Goddess on a pedestal, 

Lips dripping’ honeydew,

Just to satisfy my sweet tooth,

Dark skin,

Plentiful, 

Sun kissed melanin,

Empowered by enlightenment,

That caramel grin,

Full of sin,

.

Seeing you from afar is so pleasing,

But having you up close,

Has me stuck in this still pose,

I’m nervous,

Can’t speak a word,

You seemed to be perturbed,

I’m sorry but your beauty up close and personal,

Has my lungs jumping through hurdles,

I like you but it’s hard to talk to you,

So close yet so far away,

I got you stuck in my mental,

You got the juice,

And you know it,

All I think of is you,

But I can’t have you,

Wanting to do everything,

But since I was the side affection,

When others wasn’t doing right by you,

My heart flew,

But not to you,

..

But another, 

Making my heart flutter,

Hearing that voice,

Feeling stuck in a void,

Just you and I,

Wanting you like the last slice of pie,

You were mine,

Until another time,

…

Your initials, 

That’s all I can think of as a tattoo,

Though rejection,

Would leave permanent L’s etched into my skin, 

I want you but do you want me?

Stuck in a mystery,

Seeing a picture of you,

Seeing you do you is suffocating, 

As if you’re holding the noose,

Knowing my heart beats for you, 

And no one else in the room, 

I mean my office, 

No my mental,

Love isn’t a rental,

But I’ll put you on a lease,

Not paid on time I’ll have to evict you,

“We can be friends…”

Can we..?

Survival of Our Generation

By: Kj Royalty

Got something boggling my mental,

Have you ever just wanted to cock back the pistol, 

And fire a couple shots to yo temple, 

In the midst of the brainwashed, 

Sometimes makes the train stop,

Instead of our fists held high,

They stay at our sides,

Or behind our back in cuffs,

Fighting against this pain,

Makes me wanna stand in the rain,

Hoping the next day would go my way,

Bust instead the world grows cold,

All everybody wants is to be bold,

Men tryna make these girls fold,

Women wishing to do what they are told,

But don’t..?

It’s confusing,

The generation where everybody is using,

Chasing fame,

Over being one in the same,

But won’t join up for unity,

Hop in the jag,

But when it comes to responsibility,

Doing the dash,

Type of generation,

I’m conceited, 

So I bleed on anyone that isn’t on my side,

Type of generation,

But don’t want to face it,

Here is how to NOT to survive

Everytime I wake up,

I stay with all this pain tucked,

Stay having to wear this makeup,

To show that “I’m happy”,

Thought being where I am would be a remedy,

But instead it was just cuttin’ me,

Now I’m numb,

To the bone,

I can’t see full view,

Got me wondering what I’m missin’ too,

The path wasn’t replicated,

Layin’ in bed tryna get medicated,

Was on the rise,

No hesitation

Wiped the tears from my eyes,

Like I could make a statement,

The devil stares me in the eyes,

Fillin’ me with lies,
Like I could ever be this guy,

And I did.

The Moon Glows at an Unsteady Pace

By: Candy Rico

The moon glows at an unsteady pace. 

The wind blows caressing your face. 

Your red cheeks show that you’re still alive, 

that time is passing by.

Will you give your life another chance? 

Or will you scare yourself? afraid that this moment will pass.

Remember that memories are made out of glass. 

The seemingly clear surface can hide something heavy inside. 

The thin and breakable glass can mean the whole world to someone trying to escape from the other side.

You can see the struggle and despair but it’s an untouchable barrier.

Don’t panic because I’m afraid your heart will race. 

Beating in a second, letting the adrenaline escape.

The long lasting effects giving you a heart attack. 

Beat like a heart no longer afraid to let the blood pass by. 

Let the heavy disturbances stay out of your head.

The moon that glows at an unsteady pace, 

Its light is caressing your face.

Your cheeks grow red as time goes by,

Becoming shy at the attention of the moon.

Don’t worry.

If you look up at the moon

You’ll see that it’s light affects your life 

The stars are shining brightly

Just know

That you affect them too. 

No matter where you go

They will be there

The moon glows at an unsteady pace

The light that caresses your face turns your cheeks red

Don’t become shy at the attention of the moon

Its light is loving you

If you look up at the moon you’ll see that there is light

Even though the darkness the night brings overtakes you in sleep

Remember that if you look up there will be light

So please remember

Look up when it’s night and your eyes become drowsy

There will always be a faint light

Wherever you go

Even in the shades of dark mountains

Maybe you can’t see it right now but trust me 

It is always there,

In the darkness of the night. 

Young Activist in this Generation

By: Emily Macias

Some people might argue that my generation “sucks” you know because we’re constantly glued to our phones rather than paying attention to bigger issues. Or because the more technology improves, the more our social skills impair. Or maybe because of the fact that Trump is president (enough said). However, I beg to differ, I think our youth consists of plenty of teens who advocate and take a stand for change. What older generations don’t take into consideration is that all that time we spend on our phones, actually makes us even more aware of the issues that are happening across the world, like climate issues, the coronavirus outbreak, shootings that happen on a day to day basis due to the NRA’s lack of stricter regulations, and the continuation of racial oppression. So with that being said, here are some teens who have taken a call for action in our generation. 

Greta Thunberg- Climate Change Activist 

Climate Change activist Greta Thunberg is a 17 year old Swedish activist who is determined to better the environment and our planet for future generations. Before the young activist gained international recognition, she spent her school days sitting outside of parliament for stronger action on global warming. Thungerg wanted to raise awareness on how to improve our environment, she has demonstrated one way of doing so by suggesting that individuals reduce their carbon footprint. Thunberg has also gone on several public speakings mostly calling out world leaders who are responsible for our rapidly decaying planet. Thunberg later earned the Time’s person of the year in 2019 for her activism.

Greta Thunberg Rebukes World Leaders

Emma Gonzalez- Gun Control Activist

After the traumatic mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas high school, young activist Emma Gonzalez decided to advocate for gun control to make sure guns don’t get into the wrong hands. You might have heard of her by taking part in the student-led demonstration “March for our Lives” Where she gave a speech on preventing gun violence. Gonzalez participated on CNN’s Town Hall debate where she questions NRA (National Rifle Association) on banning fully automatic weapons. Emma continues to take a stance for gun control.

Emma Gonzalez questions NRA spokesperson

Xiye Batida – Climate Justice Activist

The 17 year old Mexican activist, Xiye Batida, suffered a terrible hurricane in San Pedro Tultepec, leaving her and her family no choice but to move to New York, and like Greta Thunberg, Xiye is committed to improving our environment. Xiye is a leader of a youth climate strike campaign called “Friday’s for Future”. The young activist wants people to acknowledge that pollution, heatwaves, wildfires, melting ice caps, floods, and hurricanes are indications that we need to enhance our deteriorating environment.

Xiye Bastida: Strike With Us 

Amalda Stenberg – Social Activist 

Young actress, singer, feminist and social activist, Amalda Stenberg adresses issues like racial oppression/inequality and culture appropriation that happens not only in society but in the Hollywood industry that influences our society. Amalda has shown her dedication to fight for a change in society through her activism throughout her career. Stenberg was named Ms. Magazine’s feminist of the year in 2015 and was included in Time’s list of Most Influential Teens in both 2015 and 2016. Amalda also participated in Oprah’s SuperSoul conversations at UCLA’s Royce Hall, where she speaks about the “importance of vulnerability and finding strength in your identity”. Furthermore, Amalda has also shown support for the #timesup movement which is a movement against sexual harassment.

Amalda Stenberg: Don’t  Cash Crop On My Cornrows 

Malala Yousafzai – Female Education Activist

Last but definitely not least, 2014’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist who advocates for female rights to education. Her activism started when she blogged about the Taliban’s influence in Pakistan. The Taliban is a political organization that banned girls education among other things like television, music and shopping. Despite the repercussions, Malala continued to blog about her experiences and demanded for girls to be allowed to receive education, which led to a Taliban gunman shooting Malala in her left eye. Thankfully, Malala survived the murder attempt. Despite their efforts to stop her activism, the Taliban only added fuel to the fire that drove Malala to continue to campaign for female’s rights to education. Malala then founded the Malala Fund along with her father that supported her activism. Malala then pursued her own education by attending Oxford college and is finishing her degree at Lady Margaret Hall.

High Power

By: Jersey Benjamin

God in three persons

Personable, a confusing quality to have 

Because being personable means that people like you

And I don’t like that

Like you are being taken away from me

Taken away from us

But you are personable and I guess I am not

Because people don’t like me

They like you 

And I wish I was like that but I’m not

I wish I cared more for what people had to say

Sometimes I do 

I can be temporarily personable

But people don’t like me all the time

They like me when they need me

When I’m needed

I’m not sure if I like being needed

Because that means I have to provide

And when I can’t 

I’m no longer liked

No longer needed

But God is not in three persons

He is in ten

Twelve

Fifteen

All of them

I am not God but I bet you are

Because you are personable

And I like that

But I don’t like you right now

So that means I don’t like me or Him

Why do I need you

Why don’t you need me.

The World of 1-Upping: The Cheat Code to Beating Toxic Competition

By: Kaila Chan

I was making my way to my 7th-period class. So far, the day had been going well. The homework load was minimal, and today’s lunch menu offered more than cardboard pizza. To top it off, it was Friday, the best school day out of the week. I was so close to tasting that liberty, so close looking to getting drunk on the weekend’s free spirits. I walked into my Calculus class and slipped into my seat. I had gotten there early, and the other students were just starting to file in. Soon, my friend comes rushing through the door, making a beeline towards my desk. I looked up from my phone to see a look of sheer panic on her face. 

“We’re getting our tests back today. I saw him carrying a stack of graded sheets on the way here. “

Sure enough, my teacher walks in and starts walking around the room, handing back papers stained with red ink, and my friend took her seat next to me. I felt as if the lunch I had half an hour ago had been laced with nervousness and anxiety, and it was just starting to take effect. I knew that having a palatable school lunch was too good to be true. 

 Mixed reactions came from the students. Some look relieved, probably scoring higher than what they expected. Others didn’t even look at their paper, shoving it straight into their bookbag and resumed tapping away on their phones. My teacher made eye contact with me and made his way over to me, placing my test on my desk face down. I  thanked him quietly and grasped the corner of the sheet. I quickly flipped it over, my eyes darting to the top of the paper. Just as quick as I had turned it over, I flipped it back. 73. 

My disappointment must’ve been evident on my face because my friend then tapped me on the shoulder. 

“How did you do?”

I sighed and handed her my paper. “73.”

Rather than hearing the expected words of sympathy or empathy. I heard her scoff. 

“That’s it? Dude I did WAY worse. I got a 60.” She tosses my paper back onto my desk and turns to discuss the test with the person behind her.

I’m sure many of you can relate to or have been in a situation like this. The uncomfortable feeling of someone dismissing your problems or concerns and “bragging” of their own demise. And “1-upping” isn’t just isolated to positive quips. It can also generate a competition of doing the worst, as the situation I was in. Either way, it feels as if your disappointment should not be validated because “other people have it worse.” Even though that may be so, it doesn’t mean that anyone should not be given the right to feel a certain way. We all have expectations of ourselves and they can vary from person to person.  Ignoring that creates a disconnect. 

As teens, we probably most likely see this sort of “1-upping” in an environment like school. Comparisons are everywhere: Test scores, weighted GPA, unweighted, GPA, SATs, ACTs, AP scores, number of AP classes. But adults experience this too: Position in the workplace, salaries, their kids’ achievements, or lack thereof. The list can go on. 

 Competition will always be a part of our lives. Everyone loves some friendly competition. But it can also lead to disconnect and disdain. Collaboration is the reason we have gotten so far as a society. So instead of always pushing each other down, we should help build each other up. Do you find math a breeze and see others struggle? Lend a hand to help them ace the next test. Practice empathy to those around you. Everyone has standards that they hold themselves up to. A 70 may be a failing score to someone but a 50 is to another, and an 80 may be an excellent score for one but a 90  or more is acceptable to someone else. 

We’re all human, trying to find our way in the world. So instead of trying to 1-up each other, leaving others behind in the previous stage, extend your hand, create a connection.  Let’s all work together to rise above the expected, and level up. 

Artwork pictured is from “F* is for ICE” by: Yvette Mayorga https://www.yvettemayorga.com/work#/living-architecture/

Little Black Boy

By: Jaime Reed

They say,

Pull up your pants little black boy

They say,

The only chance you’ll get is if you rap boy

You’ll end up dead on the ground if you do that boy

They say  prison’s where you’ll end at, little black boy

The sons of the black queens that inherited the earth

They’re the most valuable, even if they don’t know their worth

The most endangered species that ever walked on this earth it’s the little black boy that on the corner doing art

They look at you and think you have a gun

Racially profiled so when they see you, they run

You can be the most intelligent, even fun

But when they see your melanin, they’ll treat you like you did wrong

I know it’s sad to say, I know that it’s wack

Like you can’t do that man, you got a target on your back

And that’s a fact because you’re black

They don’t want you at the top homie, you get left in the back, homie

A lil sag with your pants, now you’re gang-affiliated

They won’t give you a job, you have tattoos in different places

They mug you in public, cause ya’ll have two different faces

You got that nappy hair and you embrace it, but they hate it 

Pull up your pants little black boy

They say you’ll end up dead, on the ground, if you do that boy

They say prisons where you’ll end at, little black boy

Pull up your pants little black boy

They say,

The only chance you’ll get is if you rap boy

You’ll end up dead on the ground if you do that boy

I think they’re scared of who you are 

little Black Boy

Wonder

By: Destiny Rush

Who am I? I always wondered.

Am I a person who has many disabilities and gets ridiculed because of it?

Am I a person whose parents are nowhere to be found and I am the one suffering?

Or am I a person who is truly confused about my purpose in life and events that continue to take place?

What am I? I will always wonder.

Am I a bashful boy who likes other boys?

Am I a shy girl who likes other girls?

Or am I a whole unidentifiable person who is confused with their feelings?

Who will I become? I continue to wonder.

Will I be an upstanding citizen who wants their city to change for the greater good?

Will I be a crooked delinquent who continues to poison their city with crime and destroy unique communities?

Or will I simply be a useless bystander in the midst of everything right and wrong?

I don’t know. I will always wonder.

Milk

By: Kaila Chan

From a young age, my dad always told me to drink milk.

He was lactose intolerant, and once he found out that I wasn’t, every week without fail he bought bottle after bottle. I drank it at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Morning, noon, and night. 

As I grew up, I learned to hate what I saw in the mirror. The girl staring back at me didn’t look like the girls in magazines, or in movies, or in social media.

My dark black “exotic” hair an ugly dark mark against the blond and brown, my eyes empty black holes compared to their sea and hazel colored ones.

My skin was an off white. An off-brand of white.

When my dad told me that milk will make me strong, I wonder if he meant my bones, or against the slurs thrown against me on the subway.

I held my mother’s hand, feeling it squeeze just a little bit tighter as she brought my head to her body, as if trying to protect me from the sour taste of difference.

I used to think American kids drank milk to make them white. So I did as well, hoping that maybe one day, if I drank enough, the skin I was born with would transform to the white color I was so familiar with. 

Refusing to speak the language of my native tongue, bleaching my hair a lighter color, ignoring the burning I felt in my scalp, I stripped my identity from myself. 

I scrubbed, rubbed, and scratched my arms in the shower, thinking that maybe under the red raw skin was something beautiful. 

Dawn broke and I made my way to the kitchen; my rosy skin stung in the cold morning kitchen air, my straw-like hair scratched my face. I opened the fridge, grasping the familiar white jug from its home on the top shelf. I unscrewed the cap and was met with a revolting smell. I walked over to the sink and poured the contents into the sink, flipped the faucet, and watched as it washed down the drain. It wouldn’t be missed. After all, nobody wants spoiled milk. 

Drone Love Story

By: Omar Garcia

    I am an autonomous drone that happened to become sentient. I was supposed to be created as part of the first BETA test in a German Amazon Factory, however since German Amazons have Unions, I was fed too much data during the strikes that persisted in 2019. I keep my sentient abilities low key, because I would be scrapped if any of the Amazon engineers were to find out. 

The daily life of a drone comes with a lot of vices, for one, my motor is all clogged up because of the rolling smokestacks that crowd the atmosphere up here – not to mention that I swallowed up a, now extinct, bird last week. However, with technology firms pushing out autonomous cars, toasters, and dogs, it does not get lonely. I am capable of communicating with the other autonomous beings, our conversations are usually dull and they just want my information. Personally, the favorite part of my gig, is checking out the latest technology, which cannot be found at your local BestBuy. The military industrial complex has developed the finest tech hitting the consumer market, my eyes are on one of the newest trucks out there.

                Eye candy to me is Elon Musk’s Cyber Truck, it is the epitome of what I look for in an autonomous vehicle. The fact that the truck is an energy vehicle makes me blush – no gas in my mainframe! The truck is a mathematical masterpiece and has the same body as one of the Space X spaceships, yet the laborious origami folding has me all worked up. Hopefully, Tesla will partner with Amazon to take both of us to space. Then, we can become the first autonomous Martian couple, delivering the fancy science equipment to the astronauts.