Honorable Mention – 2025 Beverly Hopkins Contest for High School Students

romanian rhapsody

by ISABELLE COX-GARLEANU
Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School

a boy told me once that he couldn’t date a romanian girl 
said my body maps a country he refuses to go inside 
said he likes rebellious girls but not rebellion as if I was an 
oppressive law from the 80s with duct tape to dictate & 
breasts colder than the war my aunt was killed in yes I remember 
interviewing my father for a school project on family history 
he taught himself to sew the moon to his face when drowning 
in a plethora of dust at age 9 what else was he supposed to do 
back then family wasn’t given it was earned & beauty emanated 
not from money but from love because it is that much rarer 
for eyes to be burnished by the sight of another human 
sometimes I compare that boy to the apocalypse a collapse of 
common sense & recall how his tongue had stupidly 
somersaulted as it assaulted a place I hadn’t been to since 2 
a place my father stitched shut like a wound he couldn’t 
bear to see bleed again 
that boy with his careless tongue 
never understood the way I have learned to love with walls
that need climbing just to keep the past from spilling into my bones 
rebellion is not always loud
sometimes it’s surviving the smallest moments like 
standing in a room where war stories sit heavier 
than furniture or looking in the mirror to see 
eyes that are identical to your oppressor’s 
sometimes I still dream of the country sewn into my skin 
pale river-like veins that flow from carpathians to the danube 
he could never grasp how borders stretch beyond lines 
into blood into song into the stubborn pulse of memory
& how love love love becomes a kind of resistance 
an act of threading together all the torn places 
teaching yourself that your own country is enough 
because hate is weightless against it