Paper Town 

the shadows wait by the tattered train station
in the tenebrous outskirts of the old paper town
hunched over the faint stench of leftover dinner
peppered with the encroaching chill of twilight
and the lone lamppost that oscillates in the stale
autumn air stretches into the paper parlor that
used to sell cotton candy for the kids in carnival
blowing away their immortal youth in vain but
always having a mother to buy just one more
token and they loll loosely by the ferris wheel
only to stop the time from flickering away
but still the paper lamppost dims out and
they are hunched over the faint echoes of
family and discover too late that mother is
gone and in this paper town even a paper
one is better than the musty shadows that
wait by the tattered paper train station for
the ruptured paper train that never arrives.

By Jessica Kim

Biography:

Jessica Kim is a high school writer who edits for Polyphony Lit and whose work appears or is forthcoming in Teen Ink, the Daphne Review, and the Heritage Review among others. She enjoys long plane rides and large servings of poetry. Besides writing, she spends time solving math problems with no solutions, watching historical movies, and eating cookies without chocolate chips. You can probably check her out at a library.