The Leonard L. Milberg ’53 High School Poetry Prize annually recognizes outstanding work by student writers in the 11th grade in the U.S. or abroad. Read the winning poems from the 2024 contest below.
First Place
Acadia Reynolds
Charleston, South Carolina
“Dissection of a Cow Eye”
Gloves first, I thicken my skin, plastic
snaps sin-smooth on my wrists, shower comebacks
beached on my teeth like whales, stomach up and screaming.
Scalpel sharp enough to shear away that hint
of a unibrow, bring it down, tap a rhythm on the blue-bleach
tablecloth. There’s meat still glinting around the eye,
like I clawed it out myself with tissue still
frothing under my nails. Cut it away, all those extra details,
get on the doctor’s scale backwards
so I don’t have to name the number. Peel up the iris
like a sticker and slice the cornea into tangerines,
the ones I fed my grandmother when her sickness
was broth-boned. As her hands hang limp
and she chews with molars exposed, I drain the vitreous fluid
and toss it in the trash, down beside the way my stomach pouts
in a tight tank top and her face when she calls me
one of those goddamn queers.
Tight-laced, that’s the word for her.
The crystalline lens, the stone strung at the center of the eye.
The lens of her, she says she wanted to be a Las Vegas
painted woman, dance like a lightning bug
and shake her blue breasts. I can imagine her around a bonfire,
moving her feathered hips for men
instead of ghosts, accompanied by a wordless roar
from the crowds hiding in the shadows.
She says I’d disgust any man with my body.
The lens has the homemade applesauce from the withered apples
that collect on her old trees, the midnight phoneline
ringing across her loneliness, the intricate braids she
leaves laid across my scalp like a crown.
I’ve picked the eye to pieces, scanned
and screened, it’s splayed out for me.
Blood on the wood, knife in the wood, put it all in the wood.
Lightsick, she’s fading, she’s juicing tangerines, writing her will,
hands to the sky and spine tree-twisted towards the ground.
I forgive her from the lens. I love her in the lens.
Second Place
Hallie Dong
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
“Mother, a Verb”
after Vicki Lin
Most days my mother is forged
from iron, striking flint under the steel
of her backbone. A slip of gold
hooked into gauzy seawater, singed
cries ringing. Mother, who breaks the sea
in half to be here. That is to say, we
are both born into it—daughters
ruptured by fishing wire, starfish lineage
obstinate and bifurcating, eyes
ticking like metallic stars. Mother taught
me how to swim, how to fix
broken things but never how to scream.
Mother tells me how sometimes
the sky bends itself to the sea, shakes
loose a piece of itself, and I wonder
if it, if I, will become an heirloom. Mother
tells me to stop speaking in parentheses,
question marks. Teaches me to think in
future tense—a land where she
asks for a spoon but gets a knife, and now
it is easier to become oysters, who
too know what it is like to have two homes.
Here, hold the hurt. Carry it like a
wound, a weapon. Make something beautiful
out of spit and bile,
bite back when you are bitten.
Third Place
Allison Wu
Cohoes, New York
“Abecedarian for an ABC”
And this is how I am born: cries shattering the ocean’s
borborygmi, marred umbilical cord clipped by migration,
chipped silhouette fading with assimilation as i hold
diaspora in my palms like deadweight, the promised
etchings of a mother tongue atrophied,
filed away between the pages of a navy
gloved passport. In the 1860s the Chinese piled
here in waves, pledged their allegiance with each
iron railed track, foreigners paving America’s future,
jagged corpses under every spike. Those left alive
knuckled sweat-slick copper coins indented with
letters held sickly in dynamite-ashed lips. I fist this
measured currency in a squashed Chinatown restaurant,
naked tongue goosebumped with masticated syllables,
oscillating. The waiter waits no longer. Instead, approaches
pity. I want to spare this body from its origins and to be the
quintessential American girl, starved golden and tessellating,
ringed in forgiveness. I gurgle vestiges of a motherland,
shudder eastward along coastlines,
trace hemispheres never mine, pick
under my tarred skin only to find nothing but a
vessel of tangled lies. I sunder this hunger
wrested from empty distances, count platelets like
xylem rings as i search for patriotism or the muddy
Yangtze in my arteries and arrive empty-handed at the
zenith: reaching towards myself only to grasp a stranger.