HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

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Honorable Mentions

 

BLANKET

It was a cloud
Sweet and quiet, not loud
And though I was scared
I pushed it down
And floated up
To join him

Up there, nothing else mattered
Life was a gambit
Covering me
He knit me a blanket

Dark, sharp thorns
Of ugly thoughts
And jealous taunts
Bounced right off
The silvery cloth

Of our gentle love

Knowing we both felt it

was enough.

Three weeks later, I tripped
The cloud ripped
I fell, clean through the middle.
Over something so little.
The thorns were there, waiting
The blanket evaporated.

 

Maxine Abel
High School of American Studies at Lehman College

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A FLOWER'S TONGUE

Delicate and fragile.
That's what I am.
Or rather,
What you make me.
I thought I was a rose
But you rip out my thorns
Just to stab them back into my core.
Flowers remain silent yet,
They have so much to say.
"Sorry" "Thank You" "I love you"
But you'll never speak in the flowers' tongue.
A beauty you can't recreate.
I close my fists, clenching my calloused hands on my words
Words I can't set free.
If I did
If my words were to escape my grasp,
They would flutter over your head in the gentle breeze, "Beautiful"
You would say.
but my words would never be heard.
My words want to hold you
Ever so gently.
Like you could wither away at any moment.
I wish you would too.
But,
Your words entrap me in a flame.
One that burns my petals
One by
One.
Love me.
(rip)
Love me not
(rip)
Each petal is pulled from my body
My armor is stripped away from me.
I don't want this.
I hold on to whatever is left.
Whatever you've left me with.
But you close them shut.
Clasp your rough hands over each petal
Hiding me away from the sun's warmth. The world's
guidance.
Only ever letting go when the moon's glow
Runs over you.
Shines upon your cruel hands.
Hiding your evil under its shadow.
Only in those shadows am I given a voice.
A time when my words fall to sleeping ears.
Only given the chance to bloom when no one is there
To bask in it.
I close again with the rise of dawn.
Your waking puts me back into my nightmares. Shut out again.
The world will never discover me.
Unclassified.
My thorns disheveled
Petals bruised
Stem twisted in every which way.
Unrecognizable.
This is what I am.
This is what you've made me.

 

Esme Alam
The High School of Fashion Industries

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​HEREDITY

I have been carrying my mother's sadness from before I was born,
And she has been carrying her mother's sadness from before she was born.

Our features are our inheritance,
Like a malignancy.
Our identities are our inheritance,
Etched into us even before birth.

My mother's womb was nine months of safety,
A home of love.
Just as her mother's was.

And when she held me for the first time,
She realized
Mothers cannot save their daughters from their fates.

I cradle my mother's sadness the same as she cradles her mother's
Because where could I put it down?

 

Srimon Anida
Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School

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AN IRREPLACEABLE BLACK LOVE INTEREST

No more disposable black love interests.
I am tired of seeing an amazing, beautiful black character
being thrown aside for the mediocre, simple white character.
I hate to see a black character being set up as a love interest when everyone knows
the protagonist's "true love" is white.
And what I hate even more
is seeing not just the character being hated by fans,
but the actor too.
And then, for days, weeks, years,
this person is told the most racist shit imaginable,
without the studio or their fellow actors saying a word.

No more disposable black love interests.
I am tired of having to see a black person being painted as a threat,
an obstacle to a white character.
Or, when the writers want to be "progressive,"
a stepping stool that helps the protagonist realize their perfect black fling cannot
compare
to their flawed white love.
Or, worst of all,
when the black love interest is killed off to get out of the way of the white true
love.
Why should a black person have to die for a white person to succeed?
 

No more disposable black love interests.
Because I would love to turn on my favorite tv show, my favorite movie,
and not have to see someone of my race be devalued for someone non-black.
Because why did Star Wars do this twice?
Once, with Finn, twice with Steela.
Even in a galaxy far far away
it seems black people can't get a break.
And think,
what messages are the black audience getting from this?
That they will never be better than a white persons mediocrity,
that they are not desirable,
aren't meant to be love interests,
are disposable and can be cast aside for someone who isn't black.
 

Let's make a movie about a black person who falls in love,
and it can be with anybody
black, white, asian, latino, indigenous,
it doesn't matter.
What matters is that they love this black person so, so much
there is no doubt they are their true love
and this black person is going to be loved,
be cherished, be supported.
And the black person won't die,
won't be a stepping stool,
or an obstacle in a white person's story.
Because this movie is about them
and it won't be about how terrible it is to not be white
it will be a simple movie,
a sweet love story where a black person is being loved.
A movie where there are no more disposable black love interests,
because it will be replaced
by an irreplaceable black love interest.

 

Johnna Bagley
Urban Assembly School for Media Studies

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PAPER PLANE

A paper plane
One gust of wind will surely
Spell its sentence
Regardless, soar it must
For the skies are where it belongs
And if it were to crash?
It crashed, not resulting in failure
But as a means to end his legacy.

 

Bozoumana Bagayone
James Baldwin High School

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PALM OF MY HAND

I could lecture you on how
the sour winds of the train blow and its quiet tunes roar.
On how heavy
the familiarity sits in my throat.

I could present to you the way
it roosts on those same stained lines every time.
The way it comes to haunt me
every morning, every life.

But if I were to turn,
perhaps departing a breath early or seeking a moment late,
escaping an unknown release
or indulging myself a new scene,

if I were to travel
the colors of the map,
the songs of the above,
the sights that are lost to the whir of the tunnel,

 
if I could,
the city would begin and die right in the palm of my hand.

 

Kelly Chan
High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College

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UNTITLED

I am my mother's difficult daughter
I brush liquid gold across my eyes because I think it looks nice
I see things within the grains of the sand
I will not hide I will do what is right
I am my mother's difficult daughter
The one whose hips dip and sway in the wind
I have an uncertain fire burning deep in my bones
It burns and writhes in all shades of brown
In aquamarine and stories untold
We all scream and shout but no one hears us
it's not their fault and it's not our choice
We are all brought into this world through pain and blood-soaked darkness
Darkness so deep it lives in our bones
I am my mother's difficult daughter
Her love is my greatest strength
My bendición
We are our mother's uncertain daughters
We are our grandmothers dreams
We are our mother's difficult daughter
Embrace that scary lightning sound
We are our family's difficult daughters
We shall promise as one does
We will not run we will not extinguish our flame

 

Catalina Guzman Charleston
High School of American Studies at Lehman College

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DAFFODILS

and sometimes you keep the candle you made on a school field trip and will never
use, because it's not a candle, and you weren't thinking about candles that day; you
were thinking about daffodils, and the hands that gave you those daffodils, and
how your hands would feel in the hands that gave you the daffodils, and maybe if
the daffodils are in your hand, it's approximately the same thing, except you don't
have a daffodil in your hand, you have a candle, and maybe the candle is the hands
that gave you the daffodils, except the daffodils are gone and maybe a candle is just
a candle. a candle you will never use.

 

Evangeline D'Amico-Fernandez
Hunter College High School

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OTHER

I'm signing a form
To decide my future
And a question beckons me
It's about race
With paper and pen
With a click on the computer
I feel my identity slip out of me
There is no answer that calls to me
One is other/white
And I felt like my identity fled in the night
Like a bandit
Or a voyager
So I struggle to click the button
The button that saddens me
The button that burdens me
I am no other
I don't want to be other
Yet like the form
Sometimes the only option is white or other
Neither feels like me
And clicking makes me feel that loss
Like I lost someone I knew
Yet the world questions
And forces
So constantly my name is other
Why can't I just be me
No option for my own
Other/white
Never felt as insulting
A question so easy
Just became so hard
I'm not other I'm me
Where's the option
Where's my skin
Maybe I never knew
Maybe this will never end
My identity is me, myself, and I
Yet the world calls me other
Like no other
When will it stop
I'm me
Please don't label me
Other is not a real identity

 

Marcus Nieves-Farmer
Leaders High School

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TREASURE

Dust has married
the deformed figure
of the plastic
that kisses
the broken enamel
of my little sweetheart
named camellia
the first tooth
that had divorced
my grimy gums
before resting in
her tiny bed
of sterile roses

 

Emma Fessak
Edward R. Murrow High School

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​LOVERBOY SEASON

Loverboy season crashes into my heart with vibrant orange skies and leaves dressed
in funeral black. It is for flannels over hoodies and hair that makes it hard to see. It
is for all the things that are safe and certain, like crawling back into bed when the
world is too cold. Yet, it is also the season where we throw stones through our
stained-glass hearts and leave without its key, desperate to be seen and loved even
if it means being hurt. I live like how soil loves the roots of a tree regardless of
what its branches look like, and when the leaves come down in the art of all that is
temporary I will have no choice but to accept their decay with benevolent
indifference: To bury one more hatchet in my backyard. With time I've realized
everything I've given away has come back to me with another name. I listen to the
song I showed you again to find you've signed your name beside the lyric I love
most, stubbornly lingering like your scent on the collars of my fall sweaters. I listen
to the song I showed you again because the verses paint my bruises gold and the
chorus rattles in my chest, reminding me that this was mine first.
Do you remember the clearing in the forest by the train station? A storm came
strong enough to turn prideful maple into mangled skeletons but not enough to pry
your name from my lips, not enough to conceal the hours spent with fingers
intertwined, though the words we spoke have long since been carried away by the
wind. Remember when I finally wised up and didn't take that train to Brooklyn? I
never understood your thirst to see your reflection in my eyes until I realized I was
the first to make you feel worthy of being seen. But as hard as I tried, I could never
live as your hand mirror. Don't tell me love does not seep like morning dew from
my pores, because I have loved in bathroom mirrors and second chances. I have
loved in playing the piano and playing the fool. I have loved in never knowing
where to put my hands. I have loved in rose-colored glasses with prescriptions of
all kinds and when they broke I loved with eyes closed– I have loved in every
season! This year, my haze of naivete gets swallowed whole by the deadly crimson
of fall's final hour. I put down my stones and surrender to the serenity of a last,
lonesome night of loverboy season.

 

Jasper Gimpel
High School of American Studies at Lehman College

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POISONED ELEGY (GREEN APPLES)

 

I ate them, the fruits of loss and shame, not knowing
they marinated for weeks under the tree bark out back,

poisoned with words I was too young to understand. Bite
by bite, my life projected in front of me

from a silver beam, like Heaven had opened
its refrigerator door—and I wondered, who is Loss, anyway? When

Aunt Kate passed on, and her body began
decomposing into the rich black molasses of memory, did she

really drip down my throat with sweetness

until my esophagus tingled as I slept? Bite by bite, my teeth
pierced bruises and acid boogied on my tongue. And when

I leaned over the sink to wash out my mouth, I caught Loss
staring at me in the bathroom mirror, or at least a girl

who looked like Loss. She sat in the second stall—door
open, skipping second-period Health, waiting for me

to read the clock she cradled in her palms, which ticked
with each breath she took, until Shame walked in and claimed

the next stall. Shame, because I couldn't remember
a single memory with Kate, not fully—not curling into ourselves

under thick wool blankets on the couch as rain drummed

against the windows, not even days we filled with awe
as 婆婆 (pòpó) hummed to the sizzling symphony

of green peppers and pork over his oily pan. Shame watched me
walk right past Loss, embarrassed to hug Her when she showed up

on my first day of school. I left Her arms hanging open—
Her eyes still hopeful, Her half-smile holding

the simple desire to watch old movies, to go shopping. Instead
I stayed home, spent hours on calls with a boy

who never cared. And then, finally, I bit into the fruit

and Shame flamed across my chest until my skin bubbled
everywhere Loss had touched me, right there

over the kitchen sink—it flamed and bubbled until I agreed
to pierce the cold air of Fifth Avenue with our knife-tip

laughter, Loss and I, giggling at our reflections
rippling across the darkening store windows.

 

Nora Gupta
Bronx High School of Science

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VOGELS/GIRLS

I.
Knee-deep in the shallow end of the riverbed, we sat crouched in the bordering
brush. (I did not yet know that the ticks were biting at my strappy sandaled heels,
the venom festering inside us) and our calves began to shake from the cold rush of
the river and the hours of waiting on relatives who did not remember our names.
In the water, darkness clung to our thighs as our panoptical sun ran alongside her
cousin in between the leaves – saluting a creased god.
The breeze drew her wisps of fine hair against my eyelashes.
Our language is shaded in between heavy blinks so our eyelids began to sing. She
taught me, in broken English, how to even our tiny palms (render them an
unfamiliar flatness, no German or girl had ever known) so the fireflies would land
in the softest part of our grasp – which was every part of me.

Our mothers called us to the dinner table with the leaves and the stained tablecloth.
We grabbed our last shiny rocks by the fistful, and I folded
my checkered Sunday dress, cut from the tablecloth, upwards
to keep the rocks safely in my grasp and wondered if this is what it's like
to be a mother. Specs of purple nail polish floating down the stream, our bliss
dripped onto the gravel path as we tripped on our toes up the hill.

The grain of our grandfather's unpolished wooden bench sliced
against the underbelly of my thighs and her face
split in two, her teeth proudly bearing the scene where
I tattooed my name on her wrist
with chalk, hers near my shoulder.

In an abbreviated breath she told me I had our family
until you and this sentiment had left me with a complicated guilt
until I bit back my (grand)mother tongue: I later learned
that she truncated her double "S" and meant to say she hated our family,
for in German the difference between having and hating are found in a single beat.

II.
The photos our fathers took of us had their blurry fingertips on the frame, and the river ran black, a dark, unforgiving sludge. The pool (where her little brother almost drowned) was filled with cement, and her blue-eyed horse had died, buried near the patch of edelweiss where we screamed, for the first time, curses in English.

Me not knowing the word for nostalgia, her not knowing the word
for oil spill, we tried to explain what had elapsed, tried to explain
why our legs and the lilac grass in the field were so closely shaven.

But the word for exhalation had not yet sprouted in either of our disjointed
lexicons. I now know diasporic and dysphoric still sound the same on my tongue:
neither the land nor the body will ever be mine.

 

Madeline Berberian-Hutchinson
Stuyvesant High School

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SHARED FEMININE CONSCIOUSNESS

it's hating your birthday
while being catcalled less as you age

it's divine feminine spirituality
and divine feminine rage

it's being gazed upon
thirsted after
hungered for
and still feeling lonely

it's the voice in my head
break the cycle.

Oh, these feminine urges.
break the cycle.

who entrusted me with a heart
that knows no bounds?
with the task to love and to feel and to want?
i am tied to the moon's
tide to the stars to the sea i know
you can see me

we are the same, you and i
we share the same core
and we share the same mind
our bodies are linked and intertwined
today we are tired
tired of being told we are not
tied
together

today we will prepare silently
today we will have restraint
break the cycle.

today we rest
but tomorrow

we will paint.

 

Zoey Marcus
Stuyvesant High School

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​GROUNDCHERRIES

In the summer when it's over and my veins shine like rock dust over soil beds we
eat nightshades. I tell you the story of my body like an old song. I tell you the
omens are bursting in my capillaries. You tell me
nothing has lived that does not live inside us. There is no future
written in the lining of our stomachs. You tell me to kill specificity.

I tried to just char the tomatoes but they swelled too much; I'm sorry; I have never
learned to tell heat from darkness, ripeness from redness, I never told you how I
longed to pick the fruit from the vine at the first sign of striation, how I loved the
meat-taste of greenness. I'm an all-or-nothing creature. The seeds spill like tea
leaves from wet flesh. The steel turns to iron in my hands, purity pulling at my
arms. I make a hearth out of a stovetop.
When the sun starts sinking I recall I could never get to fairyland.

Groundcherries are wrapped in paper-flower ghosts and do not promise anything.
Someday I will bake a pie so golden you're afraid to touch it.
Groundcherries taste like earth and smell like the sun over the river. My backyard
dirt is made of dust. These roots have lived for eighteen years. When paradox runs
down your chin and the loosed horses run down the road will you thank me? Will
you see circles in the sky?
Will you know what it means to dash out among hooves and vines and let them
draw new patterns on your skin?

When I pick from a new tree I know two things:
I am planting my hands on it. We are planting seeds in fruiting bodies.

 

Audrey O'Heir
Hunter College High School

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24 HOURS

I am too emotional.
A girl enraged on behalf of nations.
Crushed by the weight of morality.
Is it truly a gift to live when one is devoured by shadows?

A melon baller scoops my heart out and waves it as a white flag.
Must things always be this way?
Plagues following generations, buses of bodies, biblical Friday floods.
CARPE DIEM.
Don't waste your precious time, young fowl.
Fly free, though don't let your wings thrash in my
hair. I may collapse from a gust of wind.

Too emotional. Fragile. Destructive.
Though, when god bathes my city no one bats an eye.
When silence wipes away millions, the day goes on.
The individual holds up the universe.
Seize the day.
Save the world.
Be home for dinner.

 

Cortez Pagan
The Bronx High School of Science

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SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ

Can you imagine the emotion one feels when they see their mother lonely and in
expressed shock all because they were born out of wedlock. This is the beginning
to a story that ends in great glory

At just age 3, following and yearning for something, the idea of learning .
You see your sister getting the education you so desperately want; you beg and
plead but all you get is sucked teeth and a feel of defeat.
You sneak away and hide then compromise on the library of your grandpa.
You spend your days longing for more and instead of sitting there bored you
master philosophical debate, Latin, and the Aztec language of Nahuatl.
Your passion for knowledge expands and with those powerful hands, pick up that
utensil and let the words flow like a river that is ever so gentle.
You sit and observe the world around you..

At age 16 you write in a hurry about the "Foolish Men" and little do you know you
have created controversy.
Men now adore you but you don't want to be applauded.
You turn your back on them and stick to what you know best, Knowledge.
But because of the day in age, you can't just burn bright, you have to think of a
disguise just to get by.

At age 20 you are now Sor Juana ines de la cruz.
The woman who did not want to marry but be independent on the contrary.
You continue to write like you're running out of time, anything that comes to
mind.
Your privacy being invaded in 1960 did not silence you, but heighten you to
proceed.

If God did not want women to be intellectual but only sexual, which is very
perpetual, why am I who I am and living very unconventionally?
My writing and poetry is a weapon and not a force to be reckoned with.

 

Ciara N. Parrilla
Park East High School

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BLANK BIRD

"Believe it or not," the teacher says,
"Birds are made of flesh, weighted and warm."
A blank bird is hollow
Unless it's pressed against your body,
Breathing into you,
With tiny bird lungs you couldn't even begin to imagine
Years ago,
Someone looked me in the eyes for too long.
Now I would like to see only baby blue, lavender,
Crystal water cold enough to drift into a haze
With my hand pillowed,
Frigid inside
To be back in the Massachusetts pond,
Under, alone,
Would be nice because I'm always
Wriggling tinge,
Improper capillaries,
Shuffling slugging behind and around,
Feeling things I shouldn't
With creatures whom I shouldn't be concerned with
Why do I return to
The other place,
The place that squeezed my throat dry those years ago?
As if to make it happen all over again
With the futility of a glue-trapped mouse.
What a dreadful realization:
I look at little things
With the smallest facial muscle above my eyes contracted,
Providing the penetrating gaze of experience,
To whisper,
"Come closer,
I want to hurt you."
Supine soft bird,
Of knowing eyes and body,
Atop the table

Take it away to the cushioned midnight sky
Before they prod its flesh,
Before they remember she's alive

 

Soap Robinson
The Bronx High School of Science

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BUTTERFLY EFFECT

I once knew a guy
Who knew my neighbor,
Who knew my dance teacher,
Who went to the same gym as my babysitter,
Who knew the cashier at the ice cream shop,
Who knew the dog walker,
That always got dragged around by her dogs
Through the park.
She knew the kid's soccer coach,
He was definitely miserable.
He knew the pizza guy,
Who knew the birthday clown,
Who knew the family that had way too many children,
And the pediatrician's office knew them well.
They knew the little girl afraid of needles,
Who knew a first-year teacher,
Who knew the bartender,
Who knew the barista,
Who knew the first guy,
Because he was the first guy.

 

Isabelle Smith
Edward R. Murrow High School

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CARE FOR A CUP OF TEA?

There was comfort in routines.
The sun glared within the cracks,
the fuzzy warmth of a blanket,
cool air grazed to your skin.

Wrinkles, upon wrinkles,
smothered among the mattress.
As you attempt to smooth it down,
it would prove futile regardless.

(Just like everything else)

Your body moves up, and up.
Blood rushed through,
along with a headache.
But in a blink you're back again.

Steam hisses to the air,
marigolds eluded.
Redundant drops of sorrow
found itself through flesh.

Like the plague,
warmth spreads.
Wanted or unwanted
It did not matter.

 

Katy Weng
James Baldwin High School

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I AM, I'M NOT, WE ARE

I am the fish in an oily sea
I'd love to speak further but I can't breathe

I am the tree cut down in a clearing
I'm trying to warn you

But nobody's hearing

I am the turtle eating my meal
I don't want to eat your shopping bags
But I'll just have to deal

I am the kid who can't sit at your table,
Is there something about me that makes me unable?

I'm not enough to make any kind of a difference
So don't look at me for any deliverance

I'm not the one who can change this, you say
Let me live my own life! Get out of my way!

I'm not going to save you all by myself
One small girl can't hold back an ice shelf

Sorry to make you feel so much tension
But I needed a way to get your attention

We are all in this together, not separate at all
There will be no distinction if gravity falls

We are the beginning and we'll be the end
This is something we need to comprehend!

We are creation or we are destruction
In individual and collective action

Stand up, act out, have something to say!
We are our choices and they do matter
This isn't a play!

I am… I'm not… WE are.

What the mind can conceive
We all can achieve
Let's fix the water we drink
And the air that we breathe
The things that entertain us
Are the things that can't sustain us

In case you are feeling a bit of confusion --
We are all the problem…but we're also the solution.

Mentally, physically
Let's think of our future
Let's all plant a tree

But pause for a second, think it through with me
The tree that we plant doesn't have to be a tree
Make a new friendship, lift someone up
We are all trees who must continue to grow
Consider our actions and let's go high and not low

If we work together we can save the earth
Before the next generation gives birth

I AM, I'M NOT, WE ARE
I am a kid
I am NOT foolish, WE ARE in trouble

 

Waverly Winchester
Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics High School

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A COMPLICATED AND MESSY PIZZA

I crushed the rotten tomatoes
And threw them on the already ruined
Poorly flattened out
Chuck of dough
I shredded the cheese
Angrily
And without shame
Through my calloused fingers
I tossed carelessly
Pieces of basil
That had grown
From my unwatered garden
I threw it all in the oven
Making a complicated and messy pizza
It was beautiful
It was me

 

Tamara Ben Yair
Edward R. Murrow High School