List of 15 news stories.

• A June Snow

  Mr. May
  The dandelion
  snow
  amassed
  along curbs,
  before parking blocks,
  and settled
  into cloistered pockets
  of the pedicured lawn,
  where, with studied solemnity,
  the commencement tent
  mewed
  on the hill
  above the haven.
  . . .

• A Man

  Eric Lowe ’28
  A man wakes up under the sun, though nothing calls his name.
  
  A man’s room is small. A man sits at the edge of the bed and looks at himself. A man’s hands have built nothing, or maybe they have built something invisible. A man doesn’t know which is worse.
  . . .

• Cherry Blossoms

  Annabel O’Malley ’28
  The sun hits the flowers

  And they shine

  A shade of pink

  So rare it’s almost

  Undefined

  But fleeting?
  . . .

• Eyes Do Tell

  Timothy Edwards ’28
  Another knock! I shall not show surprise.
  I know that rhythmic hate behind their guise.
  Stand where you are! The chain stays on the door.
  Your presence marks the marble ‘cross my floor.
  . . .

• Fire

  Sarah Li ’30
  It melted
  It melted slowly, painfully, endlessly
  The igniter turned off with a satisfied hiss
  Then silence
  As if it were admiring its own masterpiece
  She screamed
  She grabbed frantically at the people around her
  Her friend from high school
  Her favorite teacher
  Her sister
  Her dad
  None of them spared even a look
  . . .

• In Which I Eat an Orange

  Lora Kenyon ’28
  The school provides a basket of oranges every day. I am an island, breaking the waves of students as I contemplate the gleaming fruits. Under the gentle lights, their protective rinds take on an artificial glow– despite their ostensible natural identity. That color is too bright to be real, too beautiful to come from Mother Nature. They should not be so uniformly appealing. Each little stem has been perfectly severed like an umbilical cord. Their countless pores are hiding secret chemicals, and I can imagine the curated smell that would aerate as I rip away their skin.
  . . .

• Invisible, Again

  Ashley Deng ’26
  By now, word has spread around the city that you have been chosen as the successor of Ellison & Rowe, the world’s single dominating business in the finance corporation.
  
  When you first receive the phone call from Mr. Whitmore, the legal counsel of E&R and a well-known gentleman who was involved with the corporation for so long that he has become somewhat of a public figure, you rub your eyes and check your phone again before answering, hands trembling.
  . . .

• Irregularity

  Ruby Meyers '26
  A pause
  breaks the silence created in degrees,
  layered up in edges and vertices: connections.
  A path may lead to a sum of none,
  so simple relations may never overcome
  gaps set throughout, predefined by glaring differences.
  However, those discrepancies come together, meeting on
  edges — subtraction becomes a foundation for insights:
  A diversity, illuminating inventiveness in everyone.
  . . .

• No Time To Cry

  Ella McCormick ’28
  Mrs. Confine hurried down the barren street, eyes fixed on the black door a few buildings down. It was a cool January evening, the 11th to be exact. The snow on the ground was beginning to freeze over, no longer fresh and powdery but gray and stiff. The plowed snow bunched up near the curbs, brown with the dirt of the city. The icy air was making her eyes water, so she adjusted her red scarf and pulled her coat tighter. Across the road, she spotted an officer. They don’t exactly try to conceal themselves, she thought. Yellow is such an odd color for uniforms. The officer waved, then returned to his watch. Nearing the door, she looked up at the surveillance camera. The sign below it read, “Smile, you’re on camera.”
  . . .

• Reflections

  Theodore Covaci ’28
       Brimming with amber, the sun spills over the city’s skyline. But even as it bleeds onto the streets, the runners do not slow their paces. Children merely nibble at their melting ice cream cones, and beggars continue to lay their heads against the sidewalk.
  
  Adam, too, feels sweat dribble down his neck; through his blazer, the metal bench sears his back. Still, he tugs at his dress shirt’s collar, sipping his steaming Americano. His ham sandwich lies beside him, stiff and half-eaten.
  . . .

• Sonnet

  Aileene Lee ’28
  there is no word for this great tragedy

  that clouds our life and death for at its heart

  the painting shows a harsh reality

  to us remember we will all depart

  the center only is a larger splash

  it seems the painter left it in neglect

  and others pass on by all in a flash

  so thus i wish to leave all for respect

  and yet this image makes me stop, and think

  of all the soldiers at the edges for

  i dare not move for fear that i may blink

  and cause them to continue their great war

  oh woe to those poor people who have died

  in that one great collective suicide.
  . . .

• The Color of a Downpour

  Avery Kinney ’29
  I used to dance in the rain puddles,
  with soaked sneakers,
  the rainbow polka dots on my
  umbrella bleeding
  into each other.
  back then,
  i believed that
  the world knew how
  to live in harmony.
  . . .

• The Space Above

  Naomi Schwartz ’28
  Aging white stucco crumbled off the side of the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Inside, the living room smelled of dust and instant noodles, the beige couch sagging downwards toward the center of a stained, gray rug that suffocated the hardwood floor underneath. A 30-inch TV hung crooked above a fireplace covered in layers of ash. Floral, mustard wallpaper crowded the walls, its bird-patterned canopy watching silently, their glassy eyes fixed in a constant surveillance. In the hallway, the attic trapdoor sagged in the ceiling, its dangling string, brittle with age, swaying slightly whenever the heat kicked on.
  . . .

• Untitled

  Isha Seth ’28
  Exiting the airport, I feel the heat squirming against my skin. I hear people all around me speaking, and they form sounds I’ve heard all my life but can barely understand. Shaggy dogs sleep in the shade if they can find it, on the burning ground if they can’t. It’s busy in a way that would seem unorganized back home, but here the constant motion nestles itself comfortably in the honking cars and the streets of shops packed haphazardly one on top of the other. Each piece of this place fits together seamlessly even though it feels like it shouldn’t.
  
  “Where are we going now?” I ask my parents.
  
  “Home,” replies my mother.
  . . .

• Untitled (Haiku Contest Winner)

  Malini Parikh ’28
  Daystar once again hosted our annual Haiku Contest. A haiku is a 3-line poem, where the first and last lines have five syllables and the second line has seven syllables.
  . . .