Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

‘NW DC’ — a poem

Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Ana-Sophia Mostashari, a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Day School in Bethesda. MD. You can find more work from our young writers here

NW DC

Ana-Sophia Mostashari

Contestant: Ana-Sophia Mostashari is a student at Georgetown Day School in Bethesda, MD. Image by Courtesy of Ana-Sophia Mostashari

This town stands on a tightrope.
A breeze threatens its stance.

The painted lips droop when left alone
or in a big enough crowd.

The mothers pray for their children.
And the children pray to never become their mothers.

The rich pretend to be normal.
The poor pretend to be normal.
The normal pretend to be happy.
And the happy have moved away.

Except one.
She lives by the river.
She is too naive for her years.
I can’t tell if her mind is light like her hair
or dark like her paintings.
She flounders to align two realities.

Light holds the truth,
yet shrouded in darkness
I dream.
Of California.

As if the breeze goes unnoticed there.
As if the lips are any less painted.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.