summer 2024-2025

bramble psalm

it begins beneath the rhizomes where rot smells of sugar and the lilies

never learned the difference between drowning and blooming

let’s say she is ankle-deep in the thistles' hands full of dandelion throats

each one a mouth she cannot close

she is small and sweating beneath the yarrow and I am somewhere in mulch forgetting the word for girl because it keeps changing shape

like mint crushed between teeth

suppose I see her reflection she is only a body with seeds in her mouth

sprouting sideways through her gums vines trying to undo the silence

I once loved the way grief greened curling up the lattice until it snapped

and something soft poured out not blood but sap not scream but cicada shell

she parts the reeds like scripture pretends the cattails are saints

though they choke the pond dry each August though the wind has gone hoarse

from saying her name she eats the petals off the foxglove one by one

did you know lavender bends toward sound I bawl her name and the air wilts

I believe this is what they call metamorphosis when the skin peels

without warning and labels it spring so when she inevitably digs

through all this I fold a chrysalis behind each eyelid

and bury a keepsake beneath the snapdragons we thread our new shame

through thorns call it perfume saying next to us lies a bed of marigolds

Annie Zhu, TX, Westwood High School

On Posture

My mother tells me to fix my posture because successful people don’t

slouch. But I learned young how to collapse––shoulders caving inward

like petals folding at dusk––to dilute the full taste of me, brackish

personalities tucked under my listless tongue. It was safer this way:

drip instead of pour. I don’t want straight-spine success, I tell her,

because it means laying myself bare, peeling back the rind of my skin like

a ripe orange, sticky and sour, hacking through the pulp underneath—fibers unraveling, seeds glinting like misshapen teeth. Asserting myself, my loud

laugh—digging into the tender, swollen fruit of me and letting it bleed.

She reminds me that my name means blossom, says I am meant to split the

soil, to scrape dirt and stone with my stem and bloom—sit up, stand tall.

She thought I was broken when I refused to grow until eighth grade—

I was blessed, actually, to be so unassuming, to have a frame that matched

my hunger to retreat. I wept when I turned fourteen, when girlhood buckled

and split like a husk, leaving me raw, ripe––a body measured in the swell

and plunge of flesh. I mourned my skin––how it waged war against my will,

mutiny carved in hips, in thighs, in a chest I couldn’t smooth into

silence. I wanted to pinch myself smaller, to shrink into a neat outline no

one could trace. I cursed my flesh for revolting, for sprouting before

my soul. I can't disappear in a body like mine, so I might as well slouch.

Filiz Fish, CA, Polytechnic School

the first mouthful - Nakshatra Kothapalli, TX, Dulles High School

Cause of Death on My Headstone in the White Sand Desert of New Mexico - Daniela Matassa,

TX, Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts

Iridescent Love - Lan Lagros, APO, Kubasaki High School

Still Life: Mandarin with Feathered Arrows - Juliana Pan, WA, Issaquah High School

dear universe - Chloe Zhao, CT, Westminster School

nighthawks: edward hopper - Gianna Zhang, NY, Shaker High School

one - Michelle Li, TX, Westwood High School

paint (and pain, everlasting) - Lojina Abdo, OH, Olentangy High School

Amar Kotha (My Words) - Sharaf Nuha, NY, Queens High School for Language Studies

Post Jujube Season - Ryan Li, NY, Hunter College High School

The Silence - Zacharia Bahcvian, CA, River Islands High School

pink is a slow bruise - Lasya Hota, NY, Horace Greeley High School

Beat-tween - Varsha Karthikeyan, NJ, Eastern Regional High School

What We Carry - Chloe Xu, Il, Adalai E. Stevenson High School

Not Lucifer - Soeun Lee, NY, Tenafly High School

Bereft from the Joys of the Living - Juliana Monge, CA, Rosamond High School

The Harpoon They Sent through Judy Garland's Eye - Anjali Natarajan, TX, Headwaters School

pruning - Clarisse Kim, CA, Abraham Lincoln High School

Comphet Compost - Ella Kim, CA, Pinewood School

way of life - Kufre Daniel, CA, Lutheran High School

Tangerine Heart - Minh Nguyen, TX, Leander High School

sonnet for my hubris - Dan Owen De Vera, NY, Medina Jr./Sr. High School

To Return - Mia Ha-Rozewski, HI, Pearl City High School

For Aubrey - Paul Potts, Ok, Dale High School

Reckoning With Reflection - Brianna Peralta Camacho, NJ, Nottingham High School

siren songs - Zia Sharma, NY, Horace Mann School

ashley (noun): dweller near the ash tree meadow - Ashley Mo, CA, The Harker School

things i hear from a stranger, on the way to the prom - Lindsay Li, CA, The Harker School

JUST POETRY!!!

the National Poetry Quarterly

JUST POETRY!!! the National Poetry Quarterly

best of issue

Summer 2024 - 2025

EDITOR'S CHOICE

ALL OTHER CERTIFIED National winners
Summer 2024 - 2025

live poets society of nj
P. O. Box 8841,
Turnersville NJ 08012
info@highschoolpoetrycontest.com
copyright 2025