Youth Poet Award WINNER: “you can’t be alive and still write poetry” by Ariel Zhang
Ariel Zhang is a student from California who believes that words are a form of bearing witness to the world and each other. Her poem "you can’t be alive and still write poetry" strives to advocate that we are all interconnected. In order to rebuild a space for children to have the freedom to grow and know that all doors of possibility and love are open for them, we must first see that, in times of war, we are more alike than different because we are all human. Only then can we join hands and find resilience and peace.
you can’t be alive and still write poetry
by Ariel Zhang
said the fox shelled in paper white with gasoline
beat eyes. his fur a cutout of the breathing once there,
creasing along the outskirts of the things that outlived.
the earth is a hand that caught the corpses in falling:
a bird-hunting beast and a skinless sheep in flight.
we couldn’t see who was who. come,
he said, and look,
the sky is splitting around us.
reach your hand just a bit further and
you might brush a mouth in the blackness.
skin is the bite marks it leaves. be patient,
it’s still teething. it clumsily works around our sins.
our bodies are never full cutouts, just scraps
of what was salvageable. be quiet,
it might consciously or unconsciously leave
a shred of your arm still on paper when angered.
but you can do without an arm. don’t be silly,
there’s nothing to fear of losing the never promised.
most of us are missing a limb. oh? well that’s god,
and even he split his gut for your sins. oh,
then how am I talking to you? nothing
is to kill here, if there is no skin.
but of course, man has found the contrary.
and then he set himself to burn, or I did, I’m not sure.
when the earth finished bruising around his body,
I crawled to the hole where he died. and I eat my skin to save—
butterfly scabs in my stomach rebuilding, restitching—to save,
to save his breath, his skin. and I fell asleep in his ribcage
that refused to burn.