easterday poetry award winner 2022-2023

Lemon

after Arthur Sze

When the wind trembles through the limbs of ash trees,

when the petal path wears into barren fields, kissed by the bruise of dusk,

when a chill steals your breath and finds its way into your bones,

when the gleam of Christmas lights dims into the tone of sepia,

when you pass the empty stone seat where the boy you had a crush on used to sit,

when the town you were so familiar with recedes into a haze of drizzle,

when syllables fumble to your lips and drown in the roar of the city,

when the smudge of self-denial bites into you and becomes a scar,

when you pull on your mother’s high heels, feet craving for oxygen,

when you strain your cheek muscles to arrange your face into a perfect smile, when your fingertips graze the creased cover of your sketchbook,

when you listen to the solitary songs of a mockingbird on sleepless nights,

when you teeter to find the rhythm of your life,

here is a lemon to squeeze a drop of bitterness—

Allison Xu, MD, Walter Johnson High School

Amensalism

13/12/37

A deployment. Head-cocks, pauses midsentence, battered musket

muffling wooden, gallantry sprayed thin into microphones an ever-brazening.

Bells blurring, father braided my hair in unendurable heat, weaving

the ashened strands into side bun, plaits, twin huns. Each knot a future

unnamed, buried in wavelets fanning out a bloodless landscape.

Hammered light. Steel carcass. Splash of gingko leaves, alight

on our bare feet. Kawasaki Ki-48 tumbling like a password confessed

across a fenced sky. Rendezvous between magnolias

twirling under full-bloom Type 98/25. The first morning

shell shyly sprouting like a secret heard

for the first time. Cryogenic freeze from AC the last gamble

at immortality. City blaring run, run, run. Bā Lù Jūn facedown in a pool

of Sake. A thumb-sized star soaking beside his unstrapped holster. Children impaled on rocks. A clutch of beheaded

villages, razed into a tatty scored map of Nán Jīng. Ragtag.

Snow shredded naked, slaughter puts the night

on mute. Unpronounceable,

all over me.

Haoyang Liu, CA, The Thacher School

mo(u)ring song

It is not enough to want out.

I catch the sun like a pearl in my hands and kiss it goodbye, pledging

allegiance to dawn’s itching mouth, lighting a sweetgrass cigar to see

the smoke wave me off. Anyway, I’m not worried about the cricket I left

behind the honeysuckle bush. He promised me that he would tell me a secret,

press his umber-lips to my ears and score bone-buds in my cartilage.

Still, I imagine him oxidizing under the yolk of the sun, shrugging

off his exoskeleton, and learning to dance. In my mind,

he knows how to live forever.

I’m worried about her, little girl enveloped by viscous amber in the mouth

of an unforgetting shadow. She writes me letters sometimes, tells me

how she hasn’t drowned yet, how the dusk shoves sunlight back into her

lungs, how her leaves sprout flesh. She sends me her pruned fingertips,

soft moss shoved underneath the fingernails. She says it’s getting hard

to sleep. She says the trees still beg for a body. Even now, after my

marrow’s quiet divorce from the oaks. Even now,

my foot still encaged, cemented in the quicksand foliage. I mistake the

crackling branches for snapping limbs, the fluttering sunspots for blinking eyes. Somewhere I am still pulling myself up, watching

my roots lift until I can no longer feel them praying for soil.

Alisha Tan, GA, Johns Creek High School

one of us

Everything is made of fans. Hair spilling over plastic silk, rejecting this

fanmade history & the lonesome bathroom stall light panning down

as Ayi folds language into my mellow skin. The white sleeves of the Hanfu

billow like fans, ink splattering from wrists wrung dry, and Ayi

wonders if she should pin the sleeves up, wrapped like scrolls and tied in

Western cuffs. Instead, I tell her to raise the red flag from the ground,
a dress bleeding from her separation from Motherland. Everything is made of
fans. A fantastic crowd gathers in the stadium as the dao flutters us
toward the fanfared parade. Hundreds of other children are dressed like me.

We spread outwards, webbed like a fan. Stitched together into the grace of

an exotic dancer before the emperor, bejeweling his concubines in a lull

of femininity and fanning hair, free of the rigored braids and fancy updos

under black crowns. My body is a monture of the Han I wonder how many

wars I carried on my back. How many lives? How many eulogies?

Everything is made of fans. In the early light of dawn, thousands of years

ago, we kept our tongue on the handle and bled battles on the fan leaves,

only visible when I am spread thin into the skeleton of Asia, a tapestry of bloodlines in thread veins. Breathe in fresh air walking with the masses & I imagine myself on a cliff over a battle of a million faces I could see today,

and I learn to make fans once more, body snapping at the explosion of wings. Stella Wu, CA, Taipei American School

luminary

i am wanting & i am wanting & i want the audience to sing my praises

as if my tendons are circuits of brilliance, my teeth crowned

in gold. tell me my ambition is fruitless & i will reap a fleur-de-lis

from eden. no, no, it is not short sight i approximate myself

as a crimson star transducing prominence, i am not blinded

by the spotlight (on an axis & tilted nine thousand degrees fahrenheit).

what do you mean tantalus never spits the nectarine pits

from his lips? lie to me. say it again—this time tantalus will consume,

& so will i. this time, i will transform the stellar core into

the parabola’s focus: no limit as x approaches infinity, no asymptote to stifle
my trajectory, asymptomatic for failure. what? am i satisfied now?
at the point of no return, do the spectators extol me? this is a confession:
the false notion of some stars never burning out is one i pray to be true,
so i lyse the faults & keep wanting. let me explain—i arrange my heart

into arrays & my tongue into binary notation to feign nothing hurts.

how long does it take a heavenly body from nebula to protostar

to prime glory? how long does it take to fall from grace? no matter.

i am taking a bow now—& my pulse echoes applause, but

apoptosis awaits. my dreams are supernovas programmed to die.

Claire He, IN, Carmel High School

Watermelon Seed

the executioner thrusts a crumpled child under the guillotine,
fastens the lunette, and releases the blade. the crowd gasps
as his skull splits against the tile and his blood splashes my dress.
it's the pink one, mother, do you remember? the same color as
watermelon flesh.

my fingers caress the pulp that has tinted the fabric. you used to visit
the town square, wearing nothing but a plastic smile and a scarlet dress.
you would steal young watermelons, sweet and sun-kissed, from the market.
we would carve their craniums and bathe their eyes in brine-water jars,
planting the seeds beneath the floorboards. i wonder if they will survive
if they will breathe without lamp-light and lullabies and love if the jars
fell off the shelf as the men spat on your grave and dragged me away.
i imagine my severed head crisscrossing intimate alleyways, bouncing
on broken glass, tumbling towards the weeping willow where i buried you.
i could be your tombstone, your Watermelon Seed.

he locks me up next, facing the green sky, dress fluttering in the wind,
teenage moths jostling to see the watermelon seed bloom.
if i had the chance, i would sit on the cobblestone and watch it grow.
if i had the chance, mother, i would name it
after you.
Kenneth Su, AZ, Hamilton High School in Chandler

pantomime

paper wad crashes, microphone ashes, handwritten slashes

pens break when lives shape the cracking fate of fiction

courtroom heads shaking, raconteurs fading, pioneers waiting

ink dies as veiled crimes of modern signs strip diction

silent is the obsolescence in the mind of storytellers

dwellers rush their trite endeavors with a sense of looming Never

storm-perfect timing, cartridges drying, arguments flying

page turn to fresh words as children learn the standards

flip ahead lessons, handling blessings, diverging questions

path take for whose sake when we all make same patterns

mimic claims the observations of a splintered person’s lifetime

life is just the imitation of an art form in the meantime

screens swallow focus, books go unnoticed, cremated opus

submerge vintage verses and enter the currents

juxtaposed phases, archaic phrases, modernized places

no one fears if tongues go blindly undetermined

Max Lee, GA, Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology