Student Poetry Award

I.

How to define distance: a straight line or
             Night collapsed into a wide, hungry mouth.

Tongue thick like stories of smoke sawed off
             A gun. Three months passed before you were

Named after the bending of light—still, I dreamt
             My mother named me after the cavity of a mango tree,

After the slick sound I made when alone. I hungered
             Through an eye of silt. My father’s first wife walked through

Walls, an elegy. She was the first daughter to
             Be found departed. Outside, I unbent light.

II.

Anthropology came to me disrobed, the pale fruit
             Of her body stained my own. I was still unspoiled,

Afraid of everything. Birds, metaphors, beautiful things
             Capable of curling into a blushed fist. No lack sharpened

My hunger like denial. Young, I accepted the open pulp
             Of my body and what it would never enclose. I grew

Where rivers bled dry in the summer months, bore
             Persimmons for my grandmother to pluck from

Each breastbone. I was fed on the fat of women who
             Won all their aches from the Earth. Still, I learned nothing.

III.

My father named me after his love of science. My
             Name was born of fruit that strangled a thrashing snake

To the ground. I promised I would only remember beautiful things.
             I'll tell you: my name is beautiful like all the things

Carried across oceans, across the pools of shoulders, across
             The thinning of my father’s back in the garden, which is my compass.

Now, my belly is simply another ship-wreck. This country you cored
             In an apple-peeler. All the pity I have won in scratch-off tickets.

I once parted myself into equal sums, one for each ocean.
             I was fable before you knew me: metaphor escaped my meaning.

IV.

My first mirror my mother, how she rose one night
             And stole her likeness from steel. Unfortunate, how I

Soften instead. Construct a fiction diet made of
             Fishbones, the scooped heart of homeland grain. The doctor’s office is

For myth-making. Ayanna, in Sanskrit, means beautiful star and
             How often do I think of Light and its fattening? This body made

Of no still water. How the doctor does not think of my body,
             Only the body beneath it. Look, this bouquet in the pillbox,

All the answers yet to be found in the sunk cost of a
             Bottle. My thumbprint on plastic, a tart orange sun.

V.

All we carried when we came here: the salted
             Smoke of sorrow in our mouths. How even our wombs

Flushed out this city’s stink. Father married Mother, who bled soft
             Pits like peach stones. I kissed the Big Dipper and still,

Emptiness grew in me like a limb. Hunger only
             Revised itself. The doctors named my hunger its own form of

Wanting. Each summer, our mouths licked into black holes,
             And we unfolded ourselves into the soft silk of buttery wings.

This softness I shed like oil, when placed in a pan, only
             Curdled. When I passed through water, I passed through nothing.