The Poetry Slam

Yesenia was the kind of girl who sat at the back of the class and hardly ever spoke. But she had a notebook that she carried everywhere, and in that notebook there were more than a hundred poems. Nobody had ever read them, not even her best friend, Keisha.

Her poems were different from the ones that her teachers liked. She wrote in English, the language that she spoke at school, but Spanish kept jumping into her lines, the language that her grandmother spoke in the kitchen. A poem about the subway could suddenly have a word from a song that her abuela sang. To Yesenia, it felt natural. To her, the two languages were like two rooms in the same apartment.

One day, her English teacher, Mr. Okafor, a man who wrote poetry himself, found the notebook on her desk after class. He read three pages before she came back for it. "These are really good," he said. "There's a poetry slam at the community center next Friday. It's a competition where poets read their work on stage and the audience chooses the winner. You should enter." Yesenia laughed. Then she saw that he was serious.

She said no for three days. On the fourth day, she said yes, mostly because Keisha had already written her name on the list. That night, she practiced in the bathroom, the only room in the apartment where she could lock the door.

The person who worried her most was her grandmother. Abuela Carmen, who had come to the Bronx from Puerto Rico fifty years earlier, had never heard Yesenia read a poem. Yesenia had never shown her one, because many of the poems were about her: her hands, her cooking, the stories that she told about the island. What if she didn't like them? What if she felt embarrassed?

On Friday, the community center was full. The poets who read before Yesenia were loud and confident, and the audience clapped and shouted for each of them. When her name was called, her legs felt like water. She walked to the microphone, opened her notebook and looked out at the crowd. In the third row, next to Keisha, sat a small woman in her best blue dress. Abuela Carmen.

Yesenia's voice shook at first. Then she found the rhythm. She read the poem that she had written about her grandmother's kitchen, the place where the radio was always on and the rice was never late. When she said the Spanish lines, she saw her grandmother close her eyes and move her lips with the words.

Yesenia didn't win. She came second, behind a college student who had been doing slams for years. But when she came down from the stage, her grandmother was waiting with her arms open. "Why didn't you tell me you were a poet?" she asked. Yesenia smiled. "I didn't know until tonight."