The Alleynian 709 2021

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THE ALLEYNIAN 709

CREATIVE WRITING

My mind is white / like the snow around us. It is terrifying, isn’t it? You see the pack / closing / in / on / us – they love the smell of flesh. Oh, but they love the taste of it more. You feel it too, entertain the metal on your tongue. If it wasn’t so monstrous, they’d call it / romance. Whose is it? Lips red, cheeks blushed, we are scarlet / on their pure white paper. The cold, grey of my wolf-pelt is long-gone / you wear it like a cloak, your pale skin like vellum. Could I write the next chapter of our story on it? See the bared teeth of the monsters around us. They want you, too. We are all / monsters. Choose whose greed you want. No / pick none of them. Choose to be selfish: feel the beast / calling within you. The creatures are / hungry. They feed on broken poetry / fragments / of verse. They are politicians / they are pastors / they are parents. Oh, how their eyes gleam in the dark. Oh, how they wish they could be happy! Our eyes are nothing like theirs: all we do is take each other in, keep it in the soul / there is no light, only darkness. We choose to be dark. Get up! Wrap the pelt around you and we shall run away.

The Taming of the Wolf Poet

Jamie Chong (Year 12)

ARTWORK — AUGUST BLAIN (YEAR 9)

A nib catches on fabric, a writer’s claw grabs hold; it rips apart its victim and it flows on to the page. The forest is full of monsters; grammar slips in the shadows like the prowl of tigers at night where I sit poring over paper. Be careful: we bite and don’t let go and I will keep you forever, hold you hostage in my mind, until you are nothing but ink. See him transform at sundown, until his syllables drip with blood and vowels fill with howling, cursed to be outside forever. Will you let yourself be mine? Keep your brown hair in stanzas where you warm my skin in the harshest winter winds when the fur falls away, the cold breaks me apart / like a fairytale except I stand shivering in the cold, it is so alone, alone, alone. Call out and all I can hear is the howling in the midst of my screaming ... and I hear it / your voice, high and clear through the crisp air.

Hold my hand and we will be fine: they cannot bite us as we fly through and we are out of the woods. Look up! The snow has passed, it is spring now: the white is green, yellow, and red, see all the world waiting! The blue, purple, pink, ultraviolet sky where it used to be death dark grey. Wake up! All the monsters turned out to just be trees, and we burn them for firewood in winter. Here I sit again at night, poring over the same lines, octaves golden and metal, and you are at my side; everything is different now.

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