one writer's beginnings

During the years 1999 through 2001, I had the following pieces published in a certain secondary school's literary magazine:

1999
a. a poem about a family returning from the beach (narrator: middle aged man)
b. a poem about the eating habits, or lack thereof, of girls from the West and girls from impoverished countries (and on her plates/are the remains of food she hates/sandwich crusts, broccoli stems)
c. a poem about 43-year-old man's nostalgia for childhood
d. a short story about an incarcerated woman giving birth*

2000
a. a poem about domestic abuse
b. a short story about a mentally unstable woman miscarrying her child and subsequently drowning herself**

2001
a. a poem about a poor mother trying to make a life for her son
b. a poem about a bi-racial relationship

I wonder that my family did not worry over me, but clearly they were not too concerned, as I never appeared to have a curfew and was mostly spared from what one of my siblings refers to as "Monologues with My Father."*** In fact, I may have been entirely too wholesome--I even cried over the only C I've ever received.**** Ultimately, I say that the mildly amusing list is evidence of the mind's potential for empathy and imagination (however maudlin)***** rather than that of a disturbed teenager.

*Rather than a product of my imagination, this one was inspired by a photograph.
**This one is the most painful one to reread. Did I actually write this? I'd like to blame it on reading bad fiction from The New Yorker but my mother refused to buy it during the Tina Brown days.
***If you know our father, you'll know who did the talking.
****Algebra, and in my defense it was not due to an inability to comprehend algebra, but a habit of wavering attention...sometimes due to writing the pieces listed above.
*****A final comment: while a rereading of the above pieces may find one turning certain shades of pink and/or crowing with laughter, my use of figurative language and experimentation does show a spark for the craft***** (although I promise to never ever again refer to the embrace of a bi-racial couple as like an Oreo cookie).
*****Two selections:

The handcuffs and shackles lie there in metal crumples like serpents...

and, in a variation on the serpentine theme:

Coming back from the beach
My wife and daughters burnt red,
Faces like shining Buddhas.
A week later
Their bodies emerging, snakes
From decaying skin.