South Spring Street

‘It was given the name South Spring

after Persephone, drugged either by love

or pomegranate kernel, decided once-and-for-all

to push back the date of which she was supposed

to return to us from the underworld. Attributable

to the delay and the goddess’ slow foot pace,

Spring would be arriving late. The name

is thus to remind the immortal one that we,

those who are still shivering under Demeter’s

anger in the southern part of New Hampshire,

specifically on this god-damn street, are still waiting,

waiting for the bitter cold to wear off our skins

and for blood to return to our veins so that we

could work or go to school without being trapped

inside of a house and forced to watch cream

color paint desperately peeling itself off of the interior

walls of our kitchens and bedrooms for god

knows how many more generations.’ This myth

which had repeatedly shown up on the tip

of my father’s tongue during the days we lived

in the house with a broken heater on South Spring

Street was my favorite childhood bedtime story. True.

South Spring Street was icy and sometimes unpleasant

especially when you only owned a few blankets

to keep yourself out of the cold. But looking back,

the street itself reminded me nothing but those cuddling

nights in which my father and I spent doing nothing

but criticizing gods and keeping ourselves warm.

Hannah Tu is a junior at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, where she studies International Communication and Creative Writing. Hannah was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She moved to Concord, New Hampshire at the age of seven and briefly stayed there for a year and a half. As a child, she was fascinated in language and writing. Hannah learnt how to read Mandarin at the age of six, and wrote her first English poem, Autumn, at the age of eight at her elementary school. In 2013, she was elected as one of the top candidates to represent her middle school in a Mandarin poem-writing contest. In 2016, she published two of her poems, The Heartless Tale and Fishing Boats, in her high school’s magazine. Currently, Hannah is the staff member of Pepperdine University’s literary and arts magazine The Expressionist. She continues her passionate writing by engaging herself in different literary clubs, and further her language talent by learning her fourth language, Japanese.