1
Honorable Mention
DULLING MY SHINE
With this country that preaches
liberty and justice for all
Yet nature is illegal
And cops are busting teens
with baggies in their socks
Instead of the malicious, corporate,
spirit-murdering tyrants
Who walk high above the rest of us
with their ties and shiny shoes.
With its twisted faiths
about this god and that
I am god
And so are you
Because the only thing we’re sure of
is our very own existence
And barely even that
I’d rather drown in my sins
Than live by your rules
With its education systems
full of standardized tests
and classrooms with rows
of desks where they seat us
and drill facts into our skulls
Who are you to tell me what I’m made of
These atoms and molecules
don’t mean a thing to me
My flesh is made of memories
and my bones from ashes of stars
Textbooks don’t have the answers
to why I am like this
There’s a difference between knowledge
and being educated
We believe we are so keen
Big brains and opposable thumbs
Yet we mistreat our earth
Forgetting that one day we’ll be a part of her
An evil species
We have imprisoned ourselves
Bred children that bury their sins
2
in the barrels of guns
that lead to the death of innocence
And perhaps it’s the kids
with prickled veins and burnt out lungs
The ones you call scum
That see this world for what it is
I will try to fight as long as I can
but I’m afraid that one day
I will no longer shine
And will become rusty and dull like the rest
Alyssa Benjamin
Brooklyn Technical High School
MOTHER
Her skirt
A pale blue like the birds
She is so fond of
Drapes over
Her legs and flows
Curtains billowing over the window
She slips it on as she gingerly
Wipes her makeup off
Her skirt moves with her
To the steady beat of the stereo
Always moving
Colors of the sky
In our living room
Every seam and every stitch
Visible in its expanse
Diana L. Bohorquez
City College Academy of the Arts
MY ALMOST POEM
My mind,
A blank sheet of paper.
Thinking of poetry,
There’s nothing there.
I try and try and try again
But empty space is hard to fill.
3
Simple words take effort to appear
Eluding what my thoughts yearn to say.
Maybe I won’t write a poem after all . . .
It doesn’t seem to reap the benefits
As no one will agree
On what it means to me anyway.
Isaac Draper
High School for Math, Science, and Engineering at City College
AND THE WORLD WILL LIVE AS ONE
You
Me
Us
We
Let’s do it for humanity.
For the African woman taken against her will,
For the Jewish man they wanted to kill,
For Mandela who. on the 5th of December
Finally lay still.
You
Me
Us
We
Let’s do it for unity.
For the black man and Asian woman who wish to marry,
For the biracial child the young mother carries.
For the teenage girl who only claims her Caucasian background to impress her boyfriend
Larry.
You
Me
Us
We
Let’s do it for the world to see.
No more Trayvon Martins, Jordan Davis’s,
No more anger, no more bitterness.
Let mankind be free,
You, Me, Us, We.
Iyobosa Ekhator
Medgar Evers College Preparatory School
4
SLAVES OF STEEL
Us brutal makers
of cold blood mold,
Us passioned takers
of solid Gold;
Gild the banner
make eyes tear,
With patriot manner
then they can’t hear.
Us lack of human
when all shun,
Climb for top
shoot the gun,
Red on hands
with Green on mind,
Bury in sands
leave behind.
None is feel
when copper’s taste,
Savage real
dollar faced;
Us third sinners
who worship Steel,
Who heaven lack
yet play it real.
Us pray up high
then they shall, too,
Contain the lie
to get will through,
Limitless hands, on the deal
we want make Steel, we must be Steel.
Ileana Exaras
Frank Sinatra School of the Arts
SLIP
I can hear the vowels misplaced in your psyche,
and the consonants drowning your tears
5
Your lips are dripping carbon paper,
your thoughts – slipping from your ears.
Your touch is a cry for simplicity,
anticipating your future in vain.
Your eyes speak louder than the siren at the door,
that’s been alerting you to feel pain.
Your stomach’s alone for an hour
until high spirits greet it with “hello,”
but still your heart’s feeling heavy,
as your brain becomes fairly mellow.
Your fingers are tangling the air,
they don’t know where to go next
so they lie atop your swollen feet,
which happen to be far more perplexed.
Here’s to the ones not forewarned
of life’s painstaking lies
Your dampened pillow apologizes,
and forever hears your cries.
Your veins are still supplying,
they’re not sure they’re doing it straight,
Your days are shortening, your eyelids –
controlling,
nothing’s going well at this rate.
Gina Ann Fuchs
NYC Lab School for Collaborative Arts
I AM
I am the colonial's bastard daughter
Risen to the challenge of expectations.
I am the fly away on otherwise perfect hair,
refusing to stay down and unified.
I am Medusa's foremost tendril,
freezing those who dare to come close.
I am the flag at the top of a conquered mountain,
Physically in solitude, but told in the lore of stronger men.
6
I am the crowd.
I am the silence in the center of it all,
the unspoken truth in the back of a liar's mind.
I am there and not there at all.
I am whole while I am becoming.
I am a fixed point.
I am in us all.
Jadey Good
James Baldwin High School
OPEN BOOK
I’ve learned to j-walk by the side of my father,
Speak loud in the face of my mother
And do what I want in the footsteps of my sister.
I’ve kept every good song I’ve listened to
In my head for bad days
and eaten raspberries off my fingertips.
I’ve laughed for longer than appropriate
Said things that sound silly
And tripped in every shoe I’ve worn.
I’ve spent more time
Bent down inspecting insects
Than I have stomping on them with my toes.
I’ve treated every magazine like art work
And every memory
I keep in a library
I’ve made of open books.
Maya Greenberg
La Guardia High School
MOMMA
When I became a vegetarian,
My mother mailed me a two-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Smith and Wollensky
“Enjoy the salad,
Love,
7
Mom.”
I come home on Thanksgiving Day,
It’s one in the morning and she has just put the bird out to thaw
I smell like the city
I inhale cigarettes hanging on her skin
Marlboro Night.
Momma likes me to sit down,
Right next to her hips
And tell me about Sex, Sanitary Napkins, and the Bible.
We only talk about these things because
there are only a few days to squeeze femininity into me
and remind me of all the great things Jesus did.
By four, the turkey is pink, white, and bumpy
like a baby’s skin.
She reaches for her insulin.
When the meal enters the oven, and we can see the dawn behind
the Waffle House
She recites the evils of tampons, the sin of masturbation,
And that I shouldn’t touch a boy until I’m married.
I nod silently, and I wonder if she knows all my friends smoke pot
get drunk and fall in love on weekends.
she begins to stir the brown sugar, yams, and sausage slices
In a crystal glass bowl,
We move onto Genesis:
I don’t know how to tell her I don’t believe in God.
Later that evening,
we say grace and give thanks
And never touch the food.
Rebecca Heilweil
Hunter College High School
INSIGNIFICANT
The thunder in your eyes
The one that caught me at nighttime
Late shifts that’s all they were
8
But from my mouth to your ears they would convert
The deathening sound of my heart pounding
Followed quickly after your arising
It was a routine, i knew it by heart
i was the note, you were the treble
i was the river, you were the current
i was the woman, you made yourself the man
And love you i did, i did love you
The skip to your walk
The one that stumbled, requiring balance
Just a sip that’s all you had
And to believe you i wanted nothing more
But i had seen this before
And quickly there was a drop
It was not the sweat on your hands
Or the pressure of your commands
Nor was it the sickening unidentified smell
It was the repeated marks
The ones that had me wearing long sleeves
In early June and avoiding contact
But love you i did, i did love you
And i guess i left no room at all for me
It was shockingly surprising how a smile fell on my face
There was a yearning for it that i swear
i stare as you wake and wash your face
As you stare as blood disappears down the drain
As i clean up white remains of what you left behind
And hate you i did, i did hate you
Helen Hurtado
City College Academy of the Arts
HARBORING
The sand
Has the same graininess that I remember.
Its uneven scattering on the boardwalk
Is the same.
Daydreams are a veil, but the honey star still seeps in, sticky and unforgettable like resin.
They all say they want everything,
So that they’ll never feel lost or deprived, ever.
They’ve yet to breathe themselves into the skyline that’s kissing the wings of dawn,
They’ve yet to capsule away the distant wreckage that’s closer to meaningless
Than you could confess.
Rise from the rocking chair darling, and listen to the one who whispers to you, “Your eyes
are blue, blue, blue.”
9
Let your mortality murmur sleepily to you, “They will never know,”
While you trace the shapes of lonely hands in salted air . . .
Anh Le
Susan E. Wagner High School
SLANT/RHYME
i.
gravity
has been pulling her pigtails. Her hair is longer so the curls
spiral gracefully into waves. She is shorter so her body
is wider & at the same time more compact. At the same time
I think she lives on the moon most days, there is less force
attacking her shoulders & making them bend
ii. exoskeleton
sometimes I feel like the clothes that hold the gooey mass of intestines inside me
together. Tight shirts shape my breasts and high-waisted jeans suck in
my stomach. I don’t know the etymology of the word ileum but note that
it’s only one letter away from Ilium, the most destroyed city on earth.
She too seems to wish for some kind of armor.
iii. rhyme
sometimes I feel like a latter-day atlas, bones grinding against one
another against the pressure exerted by the force of hands coming down
on piano keys which vibrate a string (or an intestine). Our faces
rhyme. She lives on the moon. I try to tell her your name means love my
name means light there is a difference there. Love embraces, light rejects.
Light only shines in specific places and is always surrounded by darkness.
Love is – but he can only hear the rhythm and melody of the keys, which
are analogous to mine but maybe a fifth higher, an octave, I can’t tell I
don’t know music.
iv. slant/rhyme
But I do know that both our eyes slant when we smile. Comparing sisters
is inevitable. But Amy you interrupted, I was telling you love is love.
Even if love & covet almost rhyme.
Elena Milin
Stuyvesant High School
10
THE CHARNEL OASIS
It was a time for unreal humanity. “Dude,”
they would tell us, “It’s a transparent
school.”
The kind where you go out into the
open air
to see the flowers. Only you
don’t smell them, but
read
them. Nothing’s fun
about it though. The
wild
dandelions grow past
our knees
and the
voices
inside our head become
small.
I’d say the warm air becomes
cool
but that’s assuming it’s not really peculiar.
The sea once again is beautiful
but we imply
we’re just too
unhappy to notice.
Emma Passy
La Guardia High School
IN THE SHADOW OF
my grandfather who
walked on before I could beg directions,
he who
spoke Spanish to short waiters in cheap taquerías,
stood shorter than us all and who
I understood as a saint
and a poet,
a writer and a
goddamned bullfighter,
a radical and a rebel
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prodigy and scholar
a dropout and a professor
who cooked a rare steak while
Joplin sang aside and left her soul for you to take,
never fake.
But he studied art and I scribble abstractions,
step over the homeless on cold mornings
while he put them to bed on warm nights;
at sixteen,
on page and in person
I’m as lost as ever:
in the shadow
of my mother who knows far too much
to read what I write and knows far too much
to not read what I write:
she won’t be seeing this –
Nor my father who leaves me jealous;
I’m told I look like him and I sound like him –
last week
a girl I wanted to kiss
told me I had the same lips as him!
She never asked if I wanted to be like him.
I wasn’t eloquent about it;
I saw my fifty-six year old father locking lips
with the seventeen year old girl in front of me and
I screamed.
Michael Shorris
Hunter College High School
7 STEPS
Somnolent summer sun
Dripping sweet sweat
On a hazy afternoon
Time spent
Droopy eyed and
Wondering
Out she dances
Twirling on the tops
Of lily heads
Her voice lilting
Echoing
Honey dropped forgotten nothings
12
The white bliss
of reckless freedom
of sticky red sap
stuck between your fingers
of tilted heads
shook with laughter
she captures you.
And as she soars
you follow
him into that downy dew
of blissful summer youth
Brianna Soleyn
Midwood High School
UKRAINE
Ukraine
Words aren’t silky
Only sometimes strings of them
However mostly
Words are the coarse iron washers
That link the chains
Surrounding our walls
I’m in Pain
There is no time for “Sorrow” or “melancholy”
For my motherland
Is making sound again
They are angry
And they are crying
They wave their flags over their own people
And somehow our people end up dying
Reporters crowd the screens
That people skim
That they show other people and those people
They lend their cloth with the poorly sewn seam
But the curtain instead of ripping
Gives the true,
True sun
Merely the right to roam over the holes of black velvet
Giving the illusion of stars
And I am in my last period class
My friends are talking about
13
I forget,
Sinking into the tear
That thinks it has the power to rip me away
But I know how to swim
How deep is an ocean?
I was running
So alive with the earth and the energy that the dirt on my bare feet had given
So alive and so grateful for the infinite fields of poppy and the air in the wind
Do you think little girls understand pain?
They only understand blood
But not the blood we all see
Not timeless blood
The blood that has bled away but we are still searching for it
We are still pining for it
We say, “Look! Look!”
I may not be that little girl anymore
Running to feel
My bare feet on clean smelling earth
But I am tired of watching images of blood
That has no more blood
What am I supposed to do
When I want to run
To feel
But then I feel
And I can’t win at all
My heart is miles away
Valeriya Tyurima
La Guardia High School
THE PAST
Lingering in the air like the smell of a long crushed cigarette
Haunting my dreams like a ghost that won’t go away
Shaping my future as if I can’t change it
Judging me in every way possible
The room is silent
14
Yet the tension is deafening
I want to slice it away with my courage
But it appears to be too thick for my plastic words
With a voice that’s programmed inside my head
It taunts me
And attempts to pull me back
Keep me in the darkness as I blindly reach for the light
Do you think that I have not learned?
Do you mistake my mistakes for intentions?
Do you think I won’t overcome this?
No matter what my past is, only I am in control of my future.
Neither you, nor anyone, can tell me how to direct my life.
I hold the pen to write the ending to my own story.
I am in the driver’s seat driving my life down the path that I want it to go.
You will forever be something I leave behind and watch distantly in my rear view
mirror.
Jakia Uddin
Flushing High School
THE AUTONOMOUS MAIDENS
Flesh and bone automatons
Wear faces of oil and wax
Rouged cheeks in neat little circles
And sit like stone till called upon
They are another face among faces
With plastic hearts beating true
Clutching fervidly at reckless dreams
And smoking their cigarettes
Red lipped whispers meet ornamented ears
Bodies clad in pretty guise
Chemically altered keratin
Bottle blondes of the new age
Heavy lidded generation of the automaton maidens
Karen Xu
The High School of Fashion Industries
15
Third Prize
OFFICER VISIT
they swept in with the acrid smell of Rosa’s burning tamales laced
with five o’clock sweat, trekking in the dust
of passing commuter trains. their forehead sheen are floodlights as they slap
court orders like abuela pummels tortillas,
methodically, splintering the scrap wooden table in time
with mama’s fluttering eyelashes.
sausage fingers are squeezed into mason jars
-salsa de tomate, to Caliente mio, to cremaviscous drops writhing down to paper edges
saturated in sweat of midnight runs
(el policia no esta afuera –
corrate,
corrate,
corrate
de estos gringos malditos)
and you cringe as they lick
from the tips of their fingers to
their open-mouthed smirks.
Erica Lin
Hunter College High School
UNTITLED
I left in a hustle
with firmly gripped keys
Midnight trees rustled
Buckled quivering knees
I left my purse in the car
Lipstick and all
Mother said “Remember who you are”
Mother said “don’t fall”
They lurk in the dark
They reek of sweat and booze
One in particular made his mark
16
He liked my little red shoes
Throughout the night I didn’t go far
Neon lights stained the wall
Since mother said “you know who you are”
Since mother said “don’t fall”
He said I was like no other
He bought me a drink or two
It was then I forgot about my mother
We danced ’til we were blue
He bought me one final glass
Head lighter than a feather
Time went too fast
His skin as rough as leather
Hums faded from laughter
Darkness and fate foretold
No memory of anything after
But silence and the scattering of souls
A morning drowned in a stranger’s warmth
Shoes thrown against a shelf
I don’t know who I am any more
I’m sorry mom, I fell
Victoria J. Lopez
Midwood High School
Second Prize
MY MOTHER MAKES AN APPLE CAKE
this is the poetry of my mother cracking
an egg against the table, the yolk sliding into a
glass measuring cup; pouring oil, vanilla, cinnamon,
I am alive and not alive and all at once,
so alive, my mother whisking the egg mixture
with one hand, a cup of coffee in the other,
entirely at peace, I tell my mother
I think this is gonna be a good year,
the sun streaming in this light yellow
kitchen, a cup of coffee, a tiny sip, the smell
of apples, my mother scattering sugar
over the fruit, and I am standing
17
at this sun-drenched counter, the same
cake, my mother takes a cube of apple from the bowl,
pops it in her mouth, so alive, my mother
has been up for hours I have been up
for minutes, the sun fills the kitchen
thirty years from now, my teenage daughter
sipping coffee off a champagne hangover
from last night’s new year’s party, she is
younger than she will ever be,
she is full of hope.
I am whisking the egg mixture with one hand,
a cup of coffee in the other, my daughter saying
I think this is gonna be a good year.
this will be the year that she falls apart, the year
she wakes up on a moving subway early in the
morning with no idea where the hell she is, the year
she falls in love with a boy she will stop loving
and never stop loving, the year she will realize
that she is going to be okay, that she
is going to be glorious. a cup of coffee,
a cube of apple, an egg against the table.
I am forty-seven, I am almost fifty, I am
making the cake my mother made in the apron
my mother wore, the apron my daughter made me
at a 10th birthday party, blue with yellow
flowers painted on, I am married, I am settled
down, I am happy, I am not sure that
anything will change this year, I am forty-seven
and I am half convinced that I am past
being glorious.
this is my favorite cake and my mother’s favorite
cake and my daughter’s favorite cake, we eat it
with yogurt, for breakfast, with coffee,
for breakfast, with thick yellow pineapple slices,
for breakfast. it is morning,
it is January first, there is a whole day,
a whole month, a whole year, a whole
lifetime to be had, alive and not alive,
I woke up full of hope, my mother
peeling apples, my mother
fifty-one years old, covered in sun and in
batter, a cup of coffee in the other hand,
the sun comes up every morning
and never gets stale
I wonder if this is as glorious.
Rachel Calnek-Sugin
Hunter College High School
18
First Prize
THE MYTHOLOGY OF MY BROTHERS’ DEATHS
I.
Icarus wanted something more, so he ignored his own advice
& started toward needles rather than leaves.
of course, he got higher than he ever wanted to
--the crash was spectacular.
II.
we didn’t acknowledge his name because we were ashamed.
he looked like a girl, breasts
& pouty mouth, the former caused by too much estrogen,
the latter caused by swiping my lip plumpers.
on the street he looked innocent and beautiful enough to kill,
another sacrifice to the predators that roam the labyrinth of these
urban streets, they ripped him to pieces before realizing his gender.
still, blood is blood.
III.
Jason was gong to free sheep or grow apples.
he was supposed to be the humble one, but instead he took over a gang of
wannabe criminals & swift sailors,
famous for shooting at anyone who laughed at them.
they all wore sailor hats & carried binoculars & guns at all times,
so crime rates quadrupled in the city since the beginning of their mutiny.
eventually, someone was going to shoot back.
IV.
no one was supposed to be the baby of the family.
maybe that’s why he liked teasing cops by throwing bricks
through glass windows,
shattering everything to tiny pieces and then running.
they never caught him.
no one had his own baby at our house along with the girl he’d knocked up –
all of them eating our pancakes and drinking our coffee –
& he still hasn’t come home yet.
V.
so I was never pure, & my family wasn’t
either. I’ve been avoiding
the reflections in computers &
the sides of skyscrapers & the mirror. it’s hard to look at your own
face when it looks battered & bruised & almost like stone.
19
my brothers, before they died, were my heroes,
even if they killed & lied and broke every window in the city.
all for my safety, my honor. the snakes eat the mice in the kitchen,
& we wait for the gods and goddesses to save us all.
Eda Tse
Stuyvesant High School
20
Foreign Language Award
PARENTÉTICO
(Portuguese)
imagino se eu posso encontrá-lo nas bordas amassadas
da minha tampa de café, ou nas cristas
de seu relógio danificado pela água. cada respiração
ainda tem o gosto das pastillas de limão que você enterrou no porta-luvas,
deixadas para encher o ar com a decomposição
de glicose, quebrando as ligações de sulfato de carbono.
você utilizou a minha cavidade torácica como uma escada,
separando minhas fíbulas
fazendo furculas que você quebra
todas as noites,
recolocando-os no meus soquetes do joelho com o cálcio
do leite da manhã.
eu esqueci de regar suas plantas de tomate ontem, e nesta manhã
eu afundei os meus dedos em seus corpos, descascando as bordas denteadas,
deslizando sobre os grânulos glutinosos que me lembram fetos que ainda estao por
nascer.
eu tento te esquecer.
(não consigo.)
Translation:
PARENTHETICALS
i wonder if i can find you in the crumpled
edges of my coffee cover, or in the ridges
of your water-damaged watch. each breath
still tastes like the lemon drops you burrowed into the glove compartment,
left to fill stale air with decomposing
glucose, the breaking bonds of carbon sulfates.
you used my rib cage as a step ladder,
plied apart my fibulas
making wishbones that you cracked open
every night,
reattached to my knee sockets with the calcium
of morning milk.
i forgot to water your tomato plants yesterday, and this morning
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i sunk my fingers into their bodies, peeling away jagged
edges, slip-sliding
over glutinous beads that remind me
of unborn fetuses.
i try to forget you.
(i can’t.)
Erica Lin
Hunter College High School
MINAMAHAL KUNG NANAY
(Tagalog)
Kung maaari sana
Wag kang lilipad
Bihis ang langit sa itim
Ngayon ay hindi na
May bukas pa
Halika basahan mo ako nang libro
Diwata at gawa-gawa na
Tangkad mo ako ng kuwento
Ng kumakantang nilalang
At ang sumasayaw na mga bulaklak
Ang mga ibong lumilipad
Magpahinga ng pakpak
matulog sa pugad na inyong itinayo
Ang paglalakbay ay maaring mag hintay
Dito ka lamang
Sahi moa ng langitay tumawag sa aking pangalan
At ito na ang oras na yumaon
Ngunit ang hangin ay hindi mabuti
A ang aking puso ay kapos
Hindi ngayon
Ngayon ang oras
Ubos na ang init
Tumira kang matagal
Ngunit kailangan mong yumaon?
Ina, malayu na ang na lipad ko
Wakli ka na
Saan pumunta?
Hindi ko alam
22
Translation:
DEAR MAMA
Please
Don’t fly away
The sky is dressed in black
Today is not the day
There is tomorrow
Come read me a book
Of fiction and fairies
Tell me a tall tale
Of singing creatures
And dancing flowers
Let time be the bird that flies
Rest your wings
Sleep in the nest you built
Your journey can wait
Stay here
You say the sky is calling my name
And that it is time to depart
But the wind is not kind
And I am lacking heart
Not today
Now is the hour
The warmth has been spent
You have stayed too long
But must you go?
Mother, I have flown far
You are out of sight
Where to go?
I do not know
Kathryn Fornier
William Cullen Bryant High School
23
TANNPOPO YA
(Japanese)
道野辺に
強く根を張る
タンポポや
Tannpopo ya
Tsuyoku ne wo haru
Michi no be ni
Dandelion,
Strong roots in the ground
At the side of the street
笠井大暉
Hiroki Kasai
La Guardia High School of the Arts