Justinah Duhaime

Loaf of Bread

By Justinah Duhaime
Hartford High School, Grade 12

my fingertips
slowly stroke
the surface of your wavy slices

rising and falling amid stippled complexions of green and white
mold

each puffy cluster arrayed like starlight
echoing their brilliance down the crisp ocean of your crust

Closet Case

By Justinah Duhaime
Hartford High School, Grade 12

The rising sun shuffles his way
through the mist,
his thin blades of light search like a
turtle, in
and out of the cracks of my closet
door. I flinch,

a solitary blade slashes my eye,
illuminating
swollen tears before i once again
recoil to the
flightless feathers of my raven hair.
With my nails
scraping over my lap, I rock back
and forth like
the winter trees, shackled in needles
of ice that
scratch the pane of my window.

Both of us, so desperate to be free, to
no longer be
rooted to a speechless earth, seeing
our words
circle away like the leaves that die at
our feet.

Slowly, we reach out towards the
sun: opening the
closet door, shaking off the snow.
We cannot bare
the silence any longer. The world
will hear my
song, for I am a bird, towering
above the leaves.

By Justinah Duhaime
Hartford High School, Grade 12

My favorite black maple in the back yard is a miserable
drunk.
Gangly and alone, she licks the intoxicating snow
flakes from her toes, as
her body is relentlessly stabbed, her syrup inevitably stolen.

In the mud of spring, she is unwillingly
sober.
But when the green meadow warms her soul, at last,
she gathers her thread and sews herself a thousand gloves,
gracefully protecting her fingers, cracked and fragile from a winter binge.

The Soldier

By Justinah Duhaime
Hartford High School, Grade 12

The black shine in his boots are the only
part of him I can remember, as he walked
toward the faded yellow taxi at the end
of our driveway.
I remember the way his
boots danced across the concrete, the
way they fearlessly scattered the sand of the ant
hill protruding from the crack in the curb,