2nd Place Winner of the Summer Poetry Contest: around grief - Christina Jurado

we sat; legs dangling over the paint chipped porch-

why do purple cranes fly low

I often asked as you’d fill your pipe,

pressed brown flakes

broken between your thumb and fore-finger-

I never understood you and mami

huddled around the radio, hushed tones I couldn’t

make out; I snuck out to steal kisses from Kenneth,

the curly haired boy next door

who would knock me up at sixteen, fleeing

to Afghanistan only to be sent back in a box-

but this isn’t that story

you’d repeat on cloudy nights when asked how

you and mami met, fell in love, found yourselves in

the Colorado mountains, far from the flat sugarcane fields

of birth. recollections of when you tried

to chop your own for mojitos, as if the machetes

weren’t sharp enough; the dining room

a bamboo forest-

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Christina Jurado (she/her) is a second gen Chicana/Mexicana/Americana. She splits her life between the East and West Coasts. Christina will be published in the upcoming Beyond Words Press, Beyond Words Magazine, Home-themed Anthology, being released in Fall 2026.