easterday poetry award winner 2018-2019

To My Mother, Raised By Jackals

Mama, do you believe in second chances? Here’s one for you, I

shot and gutted it. I took out its insides. I want to be your

own personal butcher shop. Mama, I’d cut ‘em all up for free. But

the house is rotting now There’s some wailing thing

wearing your face in the rocking chair, and it won't stop crying, so

I let the flies through the screen door.

Humor me, will you? Put on your glasses, let the sunlight burn through

the glass in our window. During the night I dream our

front yard into a bonfire. During the night I eat the world whole, and in

the morning I hack its liver back up into the sink. I waste my whole life waiting for the sun to go down, which is to say, I am putting matches to the wicks of our kerosene lamps. Look again, see where

the two boys fight on the porch with the lantern-light. Do you understand it? How, like God, they only love each other underwater?

The floor is splintering. The swamp is howling. The field vomiting

up the old dog skeleton you buried last summer. It’s not so bad. It just wants love. It just wants to consume and be consumed, like the rest of us.

It’s my turn, Mama. See this? I break my fingers to feed them to the birds. See this? I break my ribs to feed them to you.

Sophia Elhindi, OR, International School of Beaverton. ​

Amherst

in the summer of Amherst, you stumble into pockets of radiance,
tipsy on sunsets–tipsy on escapes
long bouts of laughter & even longer summer shadows,
wisps of baby hairs flying up in the breeze against manuka honey-kissed skin, where we find Fibonacci numbers in the cloves of wildflowers,
solve fractal equations for the ethereal kaleidoscope sky,
map mathematics to nature, map mathematics to ourselves
mathematics – something to hold onto
because underneath golden hour & shimmying in short skirts,
that summer fling you had hoping
the sea salt in his throat would swallow you whole,
teetering teetering on the edge of morning stars–
we are the stark numbers we define ourselves by,
that point on the coordinate plane where you’ll fracture
if you press a bit too hard,
the ink smudges, the bruises, the mistakes
too deep to erase on our parabolic bodies
we are nothing more than dust
it rains everyday in Amherst
in the rain, they can’t see you cry
Grace Zhang, NJ, Princeton High School

Farewell

Oh borrowed breeze, fly home as does a dove!
For you have lifted me to crystal skies
where splintered frost draped lofty veils above
the sun the ocean's poignant songs and sighs

did echo in our corner of the blue.
Indeed we followed whispers to the edge
of sea and sky where liquid naiads too
were waiting on that white horizon ledge

to see bright Venus dreaming in a cloud
and fish for silent stars within the mirror sea.
But now reality does surely crowd
upon my mind hopes crack beneath me.

Again I wake and find my dream no more
And still the shadow looming at the door.
Jesalyn Chan, TX, Heart and Mind Academy

Lines

Forefathers,

blossoms bleed from your fingertips

and lakes swell beneath my lashes.

Breath warms the growing of

angiosperms and the antlers of

elk. Your company is sacred- the ripe ambiguity

of a pear and the crisp exhales of green leaves.

Unearth the bones. Peel off the exoskeleton.

Poems scream the chords of sonatas

and drape velvet over listeners’ ears. Winded

pleas bleed through the veil, reaching the

skin of strangers. Life is the love of relation, the

calls of connection. Sharpen the graphite and

inscribe your story into the organs of a broken brother.

The woods are vast, the pine needles brittle.

Rush to the mountains for prayer and look to the

freckled cosmos of antecedents.

They will look back.

Paige Stetson, TX, Franklin High School

Ignoramus

I Do Not Know

i want to tell you among marigolds and poppies, in gold and in red,

in sumptuous wealth and fiery bursts of singed trickles,

i do not know what these words are, i spent my entire life deciphering

Socrates Plato Aristotle Austen Bronte Grimm Tolstoy Dickinson Plath,

each secret within the glimmering grasp they treasured,

now mine to keep, to cherish, the hidden paths beyond

the confines of black and white, but one word from you,

has silenced me forever, your cadenza morphemes and phonemes,

symphony of English melodies, echoing in the depths

of submerged Atlantis,

yours was the poem which stunned me,

not geniuses, not masters, not cynosures, you,

sunbeam radiation from faraway galaxies,

stardust of the next universe,

cursed in my brethren,

why then,

how is it,

that i have triumphed over scholars emeritus,

but your simple confessions,

blind me in haze

Serrina Zou, CA, Basis Independent Silicon Valley

Explaining the Marangoni Effect

The literature of my body floats through water until it does not.

See it sink now, edges uplifted: an attempt to tread through, a last

message from the living. Skin is rolled and peeled as pieces of maple tree

leaves rise to the surface. All are level with pen’s paint on dead detritus

now elapsed. Time also floats, though upstream, like steeped mate tea leaves back in the kettle after pouring. Vortex currents, you tell me,

as if to explain this defiance of gravity. Holding up your glass, I peer

into the drops that collapse and run back down in rivulets of bourbon

tears. You say strange words of capillary tension as if that will be enough to devour this echoing time. Then you tell tales of stirring milk into our coffee, of blowing smoke rings, of watching whirlpools form in bathtubs to be eddied down deep. The story about the kerosene traveling

up the wick to ensure slow, steady burn was my favorite. Or maybe

it was the one about hibiscus leaves swelling so they could leach

into water, diffusing outward. Time stalled until it did not. You say, Come, let me read you, as you take my free hand upwards in yours. Anishka Duggal, WA, Sehome High School



An Ode to the Deer/Opossum/Squirrel

Were you not the one to run alongside our car?

Never fatigued by my child mind, you were the

breeze and the billow, the wound I could never close

faithfully yielding to I, the star.

Snow stained from the berries that you stole,

did you weep? I crane my neck to catch the ripe red of

rotting, something larger than death on the side of the road

to cast raw eyes upon the morbid luster of the soul.

I too am stunned by that light, wandering the black

road gathering stones between my palms. I dip into you

like a mirror, your image and reflection my premonitions,

fortune bound in a fur-trimmed almanac.

But where is God? For the moon does not bend and

the wind does not stir in respect. The sun cycles,

beats down, your breaths piercing, pleading, gone,

laced in the embraces of beginning and end.

You nest upon bones bridging to the other side,

stretched flesh a map of quiet inevitability and

we roll over you again, and again, and again, until

you fall back to those paternal acres, as above, so below.

Imagin Whitehouse, OH, Columbiana High School

Evan Shidler, NJ, Millburn High School