USC Dornsife Magazine 2023 Creative Writing Contest: Runners-Up
JOINT SECOND PLACE
We Are Our Mountains
By Ani Grigorian (B.A., biological sciences and English, ’99)
Here in this stretched out black
and white corridor reminiscent of an Escher print
we bump into each other
I ask, “When is enough enough?”
Is the fifth time we lost
power since December enough?!
While civilian infrastructures supply hope
gas electricity internet
this sole cold winter has other plans
Precipitation from a dark puffy cloud
wakes up even our ancestors
A dusty Hollywood winged ceiling light
grins on, frowns off
According to the foreign ministry
conditions are critical
We are freezing now
now the freezer isn’t freezing
we are down to the last piece of lavash
Sympathy is trickling through
a single pipeline hardly
consoling loss
We are closer than ever now
now we don’t speak much
we conserve the light within
Once upon a time
an energy crisis was dooming
We were all alone together
with our mountains
You in a statuesque gaze at the window
I reading you poems.
JOINT SECOND PLACE
Sabrina and the Fig
By Paul Liu (B.A., English, ’24)
That night, the sky was dim but it held quietly over us like a fermata. We had walked to our old
elementary school, talking softly through masks about the way people grow up, losing friends and losing love. We both felt young and old. It was June and the school was deserted. Orange traffic cones sat upright in basketball hoops, reminding me of how people were dying around us and we couldn’t understand how to grieve in so much aloneness. I remember how curious you were about those cones, its symbolism, maybe. You snapped a picture.
We walked past the classrooms to the mural outside the library. A low breeze blew through
your bangs, splashing us with the faint smell of the blacktop. We were looking for our flowers, the ones we had painted when we were still children, still strangers. I didn’t know what to look for — what were the colors of my childhood? But you insisted, they’re here, Paul, our flowers with smiley faces.
And perhaps they were, at least for a while as we swung on the monkey bars that were too small
for our hands. And maybe they were still there, as we sat on the cement steps, answering questions with questions, giggling.
That night, outside my house, I picked a fig from the tree and gave it to you. You smiled with
full cheeks. Laughing, you said, of course you have a fig tree, Paul! Did you know, Sabrina, that a fig is a flower?
A year later, I was in Los Angeles and you were on the other side of the country. We broke up
with our partners. It was the year we were busy trying to outrun our loneliness. In one of my classes, we read the Levis poem you recited for me once, on your lawn: “all we are / Is the design or insignia that misrepresents what we are, & stays / Behind.” I snapped a picture and sent it to you.
That winter, my artist roommate told me about how figs grow. The process begins with a
female fig wasp. It will crawl through a tiny hole to the inside of the fig where it lays its eggs and
pollinates the flowers. After all of this, the female wasp dies and the fig digests it. I thought of you then, wondered if you knew about all this, and tried to imagine what you would say if you hadn’t. That’s a beautiful kind of wholeness or do you think we would be figs or wasps?
The last time I saw you, we were trying hard to be happy. So many people had died. Most of
them we didn’t know. The world seemed small and cold. But we still smiled. And I remember you asked me, through the sweetest laugh, if I felt broken. I would have liked to have said something about the fig—how something inside had died, but we were absorbing it, growing into a sense of fullness.