It's National Poetry Month and we want to introduce you to the some very talented teen writers this month.
This year's 2016 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards recognized 16 high school seniors who received the program’s highest national honor, the Gold Medal Portfolio, which includes a $10,000 scholarship.
Throughout April, we will showcase a poem from this year's writing portfolio winners. This week, we are celebrating the work of Alex Zhang, age 18 (Exeter, NH) and Sophia Mautz, age 17 (Portland, OR).
L-R: Sophia Mautz, Alex Zhang
Find out more about the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. And don't forget to use #GoldKey!
----
A Trip to Chinatown
by Alex Zhang
If your tongue feels the dimple of
this Chinatown wonton’s skin,
it should be enough to recall
the taste of grandmother’s palm
against your cheek; its imprint
marbled into your face’s memory.
A steel countertop splattered with parsley.
Dumplings slouching in scalding waters.
When you are young, they smile up from the pot
the way grandmother likes to open her chambered mouth
and grin: all empty, all gum. Until
the day you bring home
angus beef bleeding in saran and Styrofoam.
This is not how we eat,
she thrusts her wooden spoon against
the packaging, forms a wound.
The beef rots in the garbage
while she ladles four weeping
wonton into a white china bowl.
Eat,
she commands.
So you do.
Two weeks later, you return home
with fries from the cafeteria at school.
They are riveted like a dumpling’s skin,
but golden yellow, crispy hardened
unlike the celery that wilts in grandmother’s soup.
She crushes them to dust between her palms,
lets the ashes fall to the bottom of the trash.
The pan on the stove lights a funeral pyre.
* * *
When you are fifteen,
she cannot control what you eat.
You return home with a steaming bag of capitalism—
an American burger, crinkle-cut fries, and a vanilla shake.
When she reaches for the bag
you slap her hand away
so she slaps you. For you have forgotten
the scent of boiling chives, the sound of metal chopsticks,
the sight of grandmother’s sweating forehead
and her swollen aching feet.
You have forgotten an immigrant’s plight
to keep tradition alive. That night, she gave you her knuckles
so you would not forget them.
Now you have remembered. In Chinatown,
you have wandered past lurching venders, neon tattoo parlors,
and pandering beggars
to this empty restaurant aside an alley
where a man lies asleep in a cardboard box.
Inside, the hostess eagerly guides you to the nicest table
facing the hectic streets. In the back,
a greying hairnet prepares your soup.
You smell the chicken broth before the bowl arrives.
The dumplings now frown up at you. You must eat.
Savor—this throbbing, distant in your cheek.
-----
Because I’ve Never Been More in Awe
– At Dragonspine Rice Terraces
I keep crawling up the essentially vertical incline
of the winding rice terraces.
Moist and bountiful slice of earth-cake,
lobe upon lobe of green heaven
piling on top of one another, cloud and sky
collecting in half moons of cool flat water
where the green heads of rice
push out from under the mountain,
all burned into my mind.
In a dream I become a rice plant
among other rice, and I ask my peers,
tell me, once you are cut,
how do you grow back?
How do you heal yourself?
Listen, they say,
look to your right and left–
you’ll see more rice, different versions of you,
but essentially the same thing.
We urge each other to grow back
so that we may all stand tall
together in the sun and water.
There is no design to the order of importance here,
placement is just how our seeds scattered.
Some are above others, and that’s the way it is.
Look at the red dragonfly
that died in us earlier this morning;
sooner or later its wings will flake off bit by bit
float into the dirt, and be reborn into something else.
Note the rotting passionfruit, too.
What will the design of separate things even matter,
when everything boils down to everything again,
when–shuffling forward into the mouth of purpose–
we slide back under the shining fields of sky?
Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
