Time After Time Toys Break

Poetry by Devanne Fredette of Cerro Coso Community College
Honorable Mention for College Poetry--2016 Met Awards

Click Clack

Pieces Pieces

They break 

Crash. Smack

Are they toys?

Red Red

As sweet as strawberries

Fills them, eyes and hair.

I don’t understand 

Nor do they,

This is what mother wanted

And I won’t have it any other way.

Are they dead?

Toys they are

No matter how much they scream, no matter how much they break

This is what mother wanted 

And I won’t have it any other way.

Like You Said You Would

Poetry by Izabella Carter of Burroughs High School 
2nd place for high school poetry--2016 Met Awards


The smoke rose and the fire danced into the chimney.

Hot chocolate burned my lips, while brandy burned yours.

I watched your sweet face, aglow from the firelight,

A smile played on your features when you caught me staring.

An arm pulled me close, nestling me into your side,

I closed my eyes, expecting you to hold me close.


                    Like you said you would.


Like the smoke from the fire, you dissipated into the winter air.

Instead of tasting brandy on your lips,

I tasted vodka on my own.

I swallowed the last of my glass, and the last of my loneliness.

Tears pricked my eyes when I stood,

Teetering on drunken feet.

A bed awaited me, and I swear I could still smell you in the sheets.

The late nights of love making and drunken promises had passed.

I closed my eyes,

Expecting you to hold me close,

                    Like you said you would.

Moonlight passed over your side of the bed and I felt the absence of your presence.

Remembering the nights spent tangled together causes my heart to ache.

My lungs strained with the effort it took to breath,

I felt the ghost of your fingertips on my skin.

Feeling the effects of the vodka finally stir in my veins,

“How could you leave me?”

You told me you would love me, you told me you would stay,

How convenient that when I needed you most,

You aren’t here.

Your love was gone and so were you.

You didn’t stay,


                    Like you said you would.

Contributor's note: I'm Izabella Carter, better known as Izzy.

I'm 15 years old and have lived in Ridgecrest all of my life;

although I'm young, I've experienced tragedy but also, extreme

happiness (the tragedy in relation to the creation of my works).

I enjoy hiking, photography, writing poetry, and striving to meet

my goals.

Yes

Poetry by Jennifer Jones of Cerro Coso Community College
2nd place for College Poetry-2016 Met Awards

You bring up Colombia and Korea,
“Maybe we can go there together someday,
in five years or so.”
You talk about meeting the only girl for you before leaving
this country.
And I think,
I’d just get in the way.
Your messages sound too much like goodbye letters.
I say I’m so happy.
So proud.
Really.
You say a knight in shining armor will come rescue me someday.
You say you might be leaving
this summer.
You say it twice as if I’ll forget.
I say a knight will just get in the way.
I should have said yes.

Rot

Fiction by Ray David Morales of Cerro Coso Community College
2nd Place for College Fiction-2016 Met Awards

The damp beige brick wall with red trim was slowly numbing his buttocks as he dialed his brother again.

PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE AT THE SOUND OF THE BEEP. He hangs up angrily.

He sighs as he struggles from the wall and drags himself up the driveway to try the door again. Locked. Walking back down the drive he turns and stares at the two-story house that shares the same paint job as the low brick wall surrounding its lawn, the lights from his brother’s room and the guest room glaring from the windows facing the street. He looks around the cul-de-sac. All had the same color, same brick wall, and the same solitary dying tree planted firmly in the front yard. The street, like all suburban neighborhoods in his experience, was eerily quiet. He missed the constant flow of night traffic. Shivering as the mist brought on by the evening rain penetrates his work clothes, he is about the dial his brother again when something brushes across his leg. It dives under his sedan. Startled he gingerly walks to the edge of the curb and kneels. The faint orange glow of the street lamp does little to help him see under the vehicle. “What he f-” Suddenly a Rottweiler bursts out from under the car. “Son of a-” He jumps back, trips over the knee-high wall, and falls to the wet grass landing square on his back. Lying winded, the Rottweiler is at his face within seconds.

The door has a trick to it, if you shut it too hard you’ll lock yourself out.

Then the Rottweiler begins to lick him. He spits at the dog. He stands up, the Rottweiler licking him through the motion. After dusting himself off, he takes a closer look at the dog. The Rottweiler has a collar, an owner. He looks up at the house staring blankly back at him with its yellow eyes. Maybe I’ll look around for this guy…or grateful girl. He could get to know the neighborhood, interact with the neighbors. He opened his car and took a shoelace from a work boot he found in one of the cardboard boxes. He ties it to the Rottweiler and is about to close the door when he decides to get what he had originally come outside for.

With full comprehension of his own stupidity, he took a stick of gum from the pack he pulled out and walked down the hushed sidewalk, Rottweiler in hand. Immediately it tries to pull him down the block, but he decided he would be systematic about the process. He walks up to the first door.

“Hello, ummm, I found this dog, is it yours?”

“Yeah this dog was walking down the street, I was wondering if it belonged to you…”

“This your Dog?”

The next door had an exaggerated bell that the residents seemed to like to let ring to its completion. A hopefully grateful girl answered the door.

“Oh hey, I found this Rottweiler a couple blocks away, so I decided to look for its master…” Nailed it he thought.

Awwww that’s sweet-”

Then a man walks up from behind, embraces her and gives her a hope-killing caress.

“What’s up Babe?”

He walks home tugging on the dog, as he had throughout his search. The Rottweiler whimpered with each pull. He stops in his tracks. Stupid.

He lets the dog lead him. The Rottweiler takes him past the two story houses with hazel colored lights blinking from living rooms and bedrooms. He leads him past the small park where teenagers do drugs during the long summers. He drives him through puddles, down a concrete path past all the lights of suburbia. His phone begins to ring. It’s his brother.

“Hello?”

The dog leads him to a drainage aqueduct shining and trickling with rainwater on the side of the trail. A worn Reebok sits overturned on its edge.

“What’s up?”

He looks down as the Rottweiler gets away from him and runs downs the sloped wall of the duct, barking wildly.

“Holy Shit”

At the bottom of the ravine lay an elderly man half submerged in the cold current, shaking violently, reaching out with a weathered hand.

“Call 911, I am at the ravine.”

“What?”

He drops the phone and sprints, splashing furiously through the murk. “I’m Here…I’m Here…”

The ambulance and police lights spin and flash seemingly simultaneously. Their cherry shine burning the dead weeds rolled over from their entrance. He was wearing a ridiculous, itchy blanket as we watched the old man be wheeled away on a gurney. They smiled trembling grins at each other as the doors closed. His brother is standing a couple feet away dressed in a two piece suit that either saw a long day at the office or a long night out. He has a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. He laughs.

“When you roll into town you really roll in dontcha?”

He slaps him on the back and walks off to get more complementary coffee.

The officer takes his place.

“You know if you hadn’t shown up, no one would have found this man till morning.” The officer beams. “Good job kid.”

“What are you gonna do with his dog?” he asks, gesturing to the Rottweiler entertaining himself with a plastic bag next to the ambulance.

“Granddaughter said she’ll take him in the meantime.” explains the officer.

Sure enough, a grateful girl walks up with the Rottweiler and a smile.

“Hey there, is this your shoelace?”

“Ummm, yeah it is sorry…”

“Don’t be, I’m Emma.”

“Hi I’m…New in town.”

Musical Musings of a Midnight Bosnian

Creative Non-Fiction by Alex Tellez of Cerro Coso Community College
1st Place for College Creative Non-Fiction - 2016 Met Awards

I’m going to write the greatest pop album that will be remembered and revered by music enthusiasts and historians. This grandiose statement is something I repeat to myself on a daily basis. Often, I’ll find myself listening to the Beach Boys’ seminal Pet Sounds album and I’ll always in awe by the way Brian Wilson was able to create a harmonious web of songs that have transcended and stretched the boundaries of the pop genre for fifty years. From the moment you put on “Wouldn’t it Be Nice,” you know you’ve settled on to something other-worldy for its time. Wilson took it upon himself, having listened to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, to create an album that would surpass anything the Beatles – or anyone for that matter – could ever have anticipated. The result was an album that inspired generations of psychedelic-rock groups that would eventually pave way to the neo-psychedelic movements of the late-1990s. The fostering of those seeds in the musical fragment of history is something that inspires and fuels my desire to bend pop music to my will in ways that will be remembered.

When I write a song, I’ll often confront an emotion so abstract that the only way I can express it is through surreal imagery and nonsensical writing:

I’m walking to the moon
July’s on my mind as I talk to the never-ending June
My mind’s in a clutter of jamborees in the city
It tells me of a conscious life that I’m desperately needing
It tells me of a vision it saw
A nautical, blue silhouette.

I don’t write this stuff for the sake of joining words together. At the same time, though, I’m confronting these emotions in a way that lets the listener know that I’m in no mental capability of describing these emotions through concrete or upfront imagery. The emotion being expressed isn’t explicit, nor is it one that makes sense, but that’s what makes the writing speak out to me. Surreal lyricism requires the appropriate instrumentation to fit the tone; therefore, I will often apply diminished chords, unconventional chord progressions, sudden key changes, and jazz-fused rhythms, all tucked into ballads that depict things I feel that confuse and make me feel alive. I’ve been inspired to take this approach after extensive listens of Brian Wilson’s song "Surfs Up," a song that has kept many musical analysts in confusion upon attempting to decipher the meaning behind its lyrics.

Other sources of inspiration come from the Residents and Animal Collective. In a time when musical pop icons were becoming a staple of the music industry back in the 1960s, the Residents became the world’s first “anti-pop” stars that flared in anonymity and avant-guard musical approaches to music. Through their elaborate attempts to maintain their identities hidden, the Residents, under the veil of their iconic eye-ball masks, have founded a school of music that requires very little musical background in order to express subconscious ideas. Their approach to music often sounds nonsensical and cacophonous, but after repeated listens, the music has a hidden layer of genius to it.

Animal Collective, Baltimore’s neo-psych legends, inspired me in a time where I felt all the colors of world had left me. I’d been struggling with depression for a while and completely hated the idea of waking up to the same old routines of each day. The band had been under my radar for a while now, but every time I gave these guys a listen, I’d been underwhelmed by what I was listening to. However, in this moment of vulnerability, I experienced a plethora of colors and hues upon listening to Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album that many would consider to be a classic in the neo-psych genre. The opening track, “In the Flowers,” instantly gives you images of being envious of a dancer boy that gets to express themselves among the flowers without the troubles and pressures of society. The song starts out soft, adding layers of guitar and synths that are pinched with tremolos and other psychedelic effects. Two-and-a-half minutes later, lead singer Avey Tare sings the line:

If I could just leave my body for the night…

Unleashing a world of distorted images through a heavy usage of synthesizers and tribal drumming that has forever inspired me to continue forth with my musical endeavors. The album ventures through many emotions and often reflects back upon those moments in life where we leave behind our childhoods in order to adjust to society.

I approach my music knowing very well that people will get turned off by the unconventionality of the traditional pop-ballad. Then again, I don’t write for those people. I’m lucky enough to surround myself in an environment where my creative outlets aren’t constricted. I write for those that have that innate willingness to discard conventional trends in pop music and see my writing as a nod to those past musicians that have experimented with the form in ways that have defined a generation. I’d often walk around as a little boy coming up with melodies describing the world in front of me, even before I picked up my first instrument. I write because I know I’m good enough. I write because I’ve seen my writing evolve, and so have others. I’m going to write the greatest pop album ever written because I’ve always felt a call to make great things out of myself in music. One day I won’t have to say this because the work I leave behind in this life will speak for itself.