This month at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Queens (TYWLS-Q), the girls in Periods 7 and 8 finished their individual and community poems. They found a lot of joy in combing their favorite lines to create one long community poem. Period 7 chose to create poems about food in their culture, focusing on the similarities and differences among different dishes and how that affected their households. Period 8 focused more on the realities of being a teenage girl and the ups and downs they faced.
Period 7
I come from the wooden stick
Moving in its repetitive motion
The sweet smell of warm love from a pot
I come from a tense home where we are all red fiery wings
Hurtful like the burn of hot soup
I come from “stay out of the kitchen!”
A small fry with a big appetite
Not a happy meal
I sit alone eating dry rice that sits like moth balls
Period 8
I am the color black in a rainbow,
and a rainbow in a black sea
I have two sides
one fairytale
one dark
I am not
just another girl
in your inbox
I am a person of
respect and self control
