XPI Student Showcase
Welcome to Xpress Plugged In, our new online gallery of student expressions. Please follow the submission instructions CAREFULLY. New work will be posted every Monday.
-- Nancy Green, editor of XPI
Selections for the Week of 1/10/2011
Spotlight on Alex Gagnon and Cory Draper, 10th grade
Nature Coast Technical High School, Brooksville
(Part One)
Alex and Cory on Alex and Cory ...
Our names are Alex Gagnon and Cory Draper. We're sophomores at Nature Coast Technical High School in Brooksville, Florida. We both love graphic arts and design, and take a commercial arts course together at our school. We also love to express ourselves: in physical art, digital art, and in writing (Cory). Cory's favorite hobby is writing, and he hopes to become a full-time author one day. Sometimes we do illustrations together for the stories and the poetry he writes. We know you'll enjoy our creations.
Art and poetry by Alex Gagnon and Cory Draper, 10th grade,
Nature Coast Technical High School, Brooksville, Florida
The Rose, digital editing and design, Alex Gagnon
Apocalypse Explosion, digital editing and design, Cory Draper
A Tale of Tainted Air
I tell you a tale of the hopeless and lost...
Resented by his kind, he rests in a grave destined to be his.
The air he breathed was tainted and poisoned.
Intoxicated to an intensity one would never forgive.
He choked on it,
He drowned in it,
All in his misery and self-deprivation and isolation.
He saw no hope left;
He would surely reach his last breath in this pathetic state.
His soul was shriveling and swimming in the overpowering venom,
Deathly drunk in it.
Not a breath of clean was reserved for him.
Eyes did not sacrifice the time to spare him a glance.
The breath and eyes of people
were the spoiled diseased air that strangled his lungs,
made him bleed with the fighting resistance against imminent death.
But no matter how hard he tried,
It was unstoppable, unbeatable.
He accepted the crumbling and falling of worlds.
Everything around him dropped into the engulfing mouths of a memory too-long lived;
His bones shook in their excessive insane fear.
He unwillingly fell towards the deep shadows,
Laughing maniacally,
Only to find an uplifting beyond his control.
There came a breath of a glorious sound,
A sound of all sounds,
And the smell of sanctification:
A smell that opened his eyes to a rushing flight through glorious skies,
An exhilarating rise out of the agonizing and crushing claustrophobia,
Bringing with it the face of a girl.
An angel,
With the touch of rebirth,
So gentle, so delicate and sweet,
Yet so powerful.
He once was choking and is no longer;
He is breathing her air.
-- Cory Draper
Seeing Stripes, digital editing and design, Alex Gagnon
Disturbed Film Strip, digital editing and design, Cory Draper
How They Sleep
The more faces that I see,
the more I wonder how they sleep.
What it would be like to stand over them
like a looming shadow in their most vulnerable of moons.
To be there in all my consciousness
and yet be unseen in the shadows of their dreams,
their faces turned toward me so precisely and hauntingly,
yet so mindlessly and mentally unaware
that the drum of my ecstatic heartbeat in their ears
would remain undetected.
I would see them,
They would not see me.
It would be of the highest honor
to see even the most despicable of hearts at rest
in such a state of divine equality and weakness.
Where, in that night, I would be the only outcast...
An outcast of power.
-- Cory Draper
The Eye of The Whirlpool, digital editing and design, Alex Gagnon