They told me it was the apocalypse,
so I wore wài pó’s wedding dress,
drove four hours to the forest to pray
beneath a bleeding sky. She used to say
she was born among sequoias, not in Taiwan—
swam with slippery trout instead of riding city buses
reeking of cigars. Once, we packed a picnic—
sweet bottled juice, pork dumplings, pickled radish—
and let our feet sink into the mud.
Wài pó would tell me stories:
about the redwood she once slept in,
how brush fire had hollowed its body,
how she fed acorns to an unnamed squirrel
when it snowed, her fingertips turned purple.
*
They told me it was the apocalypse,
so I cupped ash from the river,
drank deep, pretended the acidity
came from lumpy green bitter melon, the kind
wài pó swore would clear our blood.
I watched trees bow into flame, spines collapsing
like my old picture books of
Taiwanese nursery rhymes. In my dreams,
I trace soot onto my eyelids, smoky eye shadow,
ready for the red carpet unfurling behind me.
*
It’s funny—wài pó dreamt of being a movie star—
Hollywood, jade earrings, fluorescent lights.
So I pretend that I am filming, that these
scorched woods are a set and
Oscar-winning special effects—that the smoke I breathe
is dyed vapor, that the squirrel in my hands is CGI,
not wài pó’s dead best friend. That this cinder-stained
wedding dress is a costume, that the sky is only scarlet
on screen, and I’m not really trampling embers in high heels—
that my children someday will picnic in this forest,
beneath sequoias that never fell.
I keep rehearsing until my movements are practiced,
but I’m still crying in the lake with the trout,
washing charcoal from my face, my nail beds,
and no one ever calls cut.
Translation: wài pó – maternal grandmother
This poem is the 2025 Gold Medal Winner in the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest. Reprinted with permission from the author.
—
Sierra Elman is a high school writer based in California. She is the former Youth Poet Laureate of Burlingame-Hillsborough in San Mateo County, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, among others. She is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Marmalade Lit. Her work has appeared in the Blue Marble Review and the Eunoia Review. When she isn’t writing, she can be found playing Gracie Abrams on the guitar or trying to get her nine-year-old dog to come when called.
