Inscape 04 FINAL - Pasadena City College

teeth stuck in my braces; scared about the
things I’d only learn from someone else’s stories.
Worse, I somehow knew that the crown would
never be mine, and that the other girls would
never hiss those slanderous things about me.
J OSEPH M A TTSON
Night in the Dawn of Yesterday
there is a bowl of milk
that rests on a bedside
table next to where my
mother sleeps,
in it is the last testament
of love
so I take some care
not to spill it
my father pulls me aside
and begs me to take time to
know whichever woman
I plan to love forever, for
he has made a terrible mistake
although, I do not know my
father, and my mother is silently
slipping into the folds of eternity
L ISA K ELL Y
Gustave Courbet’s The Sea
The solution
to life’s misery
floats out of reach
in the hold of that sailboat,
alone, out at sea.
Men have stripped naked
and swum for days
in passionate desperation,
women have built rafts
and followed that sail, that mast;
but no one has brought the boat ashore.
I saw a man reach the boat’s hull,
but a great wave seized him.
I saw a woman stand on a deck,
but she jumped into the froth
to save a drowning infant.
I saw myself
at the top of the mast
waving a flag
the color of the sky,
but the flag consumed me.
I caught one glance
into the hull of that boat,
but could not trade my humanity
to know the secret within it.
INSCAPE • 70 INSCAPE • 71