Grand Central Station
My girls and I step onto 5th Ave,
And we don’t know when we’ll be back.
It’s home to us, love shared between each other,
As we make love to the city.
Nine months locked up,
And what made me feel alive?
Making our way into clubs,
The city doesn’t seem to care,
Gen Z dressed in the Y2K trends they missed,
And they play the music to match.
Dancing the night away, to forget,
The West Coast is on fire,
So we sip our drinks from paper straws,
As oil tycoons cash their checks.
And no direct trauma from 9/11,
But in school we watched people jump from buildings,
Always knew Sophie’s Choice, to jump or burn,
So we just dance.
And war is fought since we’ve been alive.
we’ll pretend it’s still 2000, didn’t know the world was supposed to end,
As we pissed our diapers, we would have voted Gore.
We know our time is short,
So we just dance.
what my friends and i did when the world fell apart
one skateboarded back & forth in the driveway,
a joint in one hand and black tourmaline in the other,
to ground & protect.
the other one thousand miles away did the same,
they spent hours on facetime,
practicing lucid dreaming to meet each other on the astral plane.
one redid her space as she grew out of the old,
& cooked family recipes with her mother,
they never did that before.
one watched a mother birth a child with webbed fingers,
she cried as she saw life come into a world with so much death,
she washed it’s misshapen head & cried again.
another fell in love with a woman
after years of being told to marry a rich man,
but she was never going to & she glows brighter than before.
we drank & filled our lungs with weed & spent time with mothers & watched women become them & we cried & we stayed home & we laughed & we drank bottles of roscato when we can only stomach white but we wanted to feel mature so we drank the sweetest red & we watched each other grow & we cried again & we baked brie & we fell in love & we fell out of love with men who wanted to make us small and tell us who we should be & we bought crystals & practiced magic & we dreamt of a world where mothers believed us & fathers were home & we meditated & we wrote poems & we made art & and we found music that we could vibe to & we went on walks & paid attention to the sky for the first time & we loved each other a little more than before because we became who we were always meant to be.
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Artist Statement: Both Grand Central Station and what my friends and i did when the world fell apart were inspired by how important my friends are to me, especially during stressful life-altering times such as living through a pandemic. Having a group of friends from different backgrounds that love one another and support one another wholeheartedly is a vital part of my life. I believe female friendships are a crucial part of being a feminist, by practicing it within your own life with the people you love. There is something magical about friendships between women that I wanted to encapsulate within these pieces.
Bio: Maisie Festa is a Junior majoring in English and minoring in HDFS and Psychology. She began writing poetry two years ago as a tool to make sense of the world, which then developed into a daily ritual. In addition to writing poetry in her free time, she loves spending time with her friends, who are an inspiration behind her work. Maisie also enjoys meditation and has a crystal collection; these hobbies manifest themselves throughout her poetry as well.
Cover Photo by RF._.studio from Pexels