A Howl For A Generation That Live-Streams Its Screams — Alina Amin

Look now, you can watch it happen - Live for your viewing pleasure -

Watch the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by timeless madness,

born in a burning world clogged with inherited smoke and rage

teetering between apathy and hunger strikes 

growing like a fungus all that spitting rage fed by newspaper articles

next to the giddy, reckless dandelions of being new to everything-

getting bored? don’t you worry, someone else will crash their car

and you can watch the shell burn as you go by on the highway, and 

maybe livestream it a little so they’ll have something for the reels.

-jumping off of things, choking on Tide Pods and TV static 

like nine-year-olds cursing late stage capitalism in elementary school bathrooms

spitting out all the right things to say with smiling, shifty, ever-masked eyes

that drag the other selves out like hairballs from snaked drains

and folds them neatly away to be hidden under a sneer,

itself tucked away under white-blue N95s because though

the phlegm of the virus is gone, we never forgot losing our

middle school years and our grandmothers and our laugh

to Zoom meetings and breaking news banners that never changed 

over three years, or 77 minutes, or 9 minutes and 29 seconds,

all numbers to be remembered every waking second except for those

precious few seconds devoted to nursing the small things;

the monsters with whom we’re on a first-name-basis 

who don’t smirk down from TVs but who look just the same

when viewed through squinted eyes, tilted heads, grinding teeth

and who look just ugly enough in the light to carve up all

that rage and mash it into the sadness it always was,

cold and dead on a butcher’s slab,

rotting with the old gods who thought they were forever.

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Alina Amin is a high school junior from the Washington DC area who is addicted to reading, writing, and all things literary. When she's not reading an unhealthy amount of books, she enjoys oil painting, rock climbing, and playing with her insanely fluffy puppy, Yogi.