Handwriting by Inseo Yang (17, Connecticut)

And to the poems I write
​Born in tedious fonts, the truth is,
My handwriting kills the belief I have in words.
It makes icky imprints, like my fingerprints do—and I

Burst into tears, vomit out my world, in words,
In fanciful vocabularies that
Remember Hemingway. I pray from my fingertips,
The sun also rises

(because my handwriting is fingerprints)
I dress them up, like a girl would do with their barbies,
hoping it wears jeans instead of a skirt.
It requires time, but I have no patience. I let it out naked,
Metaphors race on paper like furious horses

I never used to play with barbies, I hated disney princesses;
Maybe that’s why the polishing, cleaning, and scraping of poems
are the hardest for me. I don’t know how to dress them up, to what extent
I’m allowed to touch
—perhaps frills would be too much.