It’s been 23 years since the school shooting in Columbine, and such events are still happening today. This is a time capsule following students from two different decades during lockdown.
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Paromita Talukder
Mentee
Paromita Talukder is currently a junior at a high school in Bronx, NY. She has always harbored a love for creative writing that focuses on dissecting language and art that transcends language. She was intimidated by poetry until working with her Girls Write Now mentor and now writes poetry whenever she can. Talukder is a staff journalist for The Science Survey—an award-winning student newspaper—and hopes to continue journalism and poetry in college.
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Blackout
This poem is a climate-change activism piece that follows mother nature’s crystalized tears as they pelt down on Earth, causing a blackout in a hospital where a guilt-ridden man awaits death.
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We are Girls from the East
The poem speaks to our shared history as Asian-American women, emphasizing a colonial past in China and India, our liberation, and the formation of new rituals between generations all through the lens of tea.
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Mother’s bindi, My bindi
This poem unveils my initial relationship with a specific part of my culture, the bindi, and the change that I go through to fully accept an obscure piece of my identity.