California Girls
“California Girls” by Austin Bate-Agborsangaya is the winner of the 2026 Rising Poet Prize, selected by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. We’re honored to share this beautiful poem with you.
“On the first read of the poem, I was caught by the strong images and similes in the piece like ‘Palm trees hold themselves / like women trained young / not to flinch’ and ‘My girlfriend mouths forever, / kisses like / someone watering / a plant she did not mean / to keep alive this long.’ But then each time I read, I found something new like how the use of words such as ‘a skirt lifted’ and ‘the hills unzip’ allude to sexual violence without saying it, which gives the reader a sense of doom. I also appreciate how this poem is able to move from past to present and from there to here with strong, simple transitions like, ‘Once, by kerosene lamp.’ The poem is about intergenerational trauma and the violence and alienation of immigration felt through the daughter’s inherited alienation, but what I found touching was the title, California Girls, and how this is a poem at the core about girlhood–the speaker’s girlhood as much as the mother’s girlhood–and the painful fate of womanhood that’s like the durian smelling ‘like sugar beginning to think about blood.’ The mother wants to protect her from this, but ultimately can’t, and that’s the tragedy.”
–Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Guest Judge
My mother says drought
as she says grace,
with her mouth already full
of warning. In the Valley
the hills go tinder-brown, drape
themselves in flank & rib and animal skin.
At the Taiwanese market, I hold a durian
to my nose. It smells
like sugar beginning to think
about blood. My aunt says
when she first came here
she missed the wet of monsoon gutters.
Here, even rot arrives in a pesticide shawl.
I arrive at my aunt’s house by freeway
shivering all afternoon
with engines. Heat
making every distance dishonest.
On television, another fire
has found a canyon
full of expensive homes. Dragged its red lips
through every splintering seam.
Palm trees hold themselves
like women trained young
not to flinch. Once, by kerosene lamp,
my mother’s mother mended skirts.
She said if you pull too hard
the thread will noose.
She meant marriage.
Empire too, probably,
though nobody in that house
used words so large
before evening.
In the old village,
smoke meant soldiers
or supper. Once, mother hid
in a drainage ditch
with her sister,
grass gossiping above in bayonet-green.
Once, she watched
a house go up so fast
it looked like revelation. Like
a skirt lifted.
Now she lives among succulents,
those thick-lipped saints
of withholding. A superstition is only
a plan with no witnesses.
At night I sleep
with my phone lit,
the emergency
already entering
my dreams as a bright insect
rattling in glass. In one dream,
the hills unzip.
In another, the reservoir
breaks between my legs.
My girlfriend mouths forever,
kisses like
someone watering
a plant she did not mean
to keep alive this long. In this state
forever is a bluff to be called.
When I wash my hair,
the water turns to shoyu. Black strands
coil into eels, whisper the names
of every girl who drowned crossing the ocean.
At the museum
schoolchildren grieve
a diorama of redwoods,
bark bodies burnt to exhibition.
I consider telling them how nai nai was strung up
and burned when the Kuomintang came. How after the war,
my mother assembled a diorama of the dead.
Instead, I offer them a dirge in dreaming.
I fry the forest in an oily rain.
She named me 貝 , pearl-of-sea.
When I was born the monks warned her of wraiths.
In every language, warning is a form of summoning, but perhaps
she believed me unreachable on the ocean floor.
In Los Angeles, sirens unspool
thin as thread pulled through the eye
of a typhoon. Outside: ash arriving,
its veil already bridal
on my bare arm.
I think so this is how
a country touches back.
I think of all
my mother carried here—
rice cooker, wedding photo,
three skirts. One language
she keeps folded so deep
inside herself it smells
now of cedar,
camphor, old rain.
I imagine inheritance
as weather passing
hand to hand,
a combat of daughters. As
California, named after the mythical birthplace
of warrior women.
This nation, named for the war we wage.
By morning the sun
is a red coin we could mistake
for mercy.
Because in the dusky drift
of a stormswept land,
a child opens her hands
and begs for flame.
Every kiss is a kindling.
Every treeline is a line of queens.
There are still people
missing in the foothills. According to my mother, I was miscarried
into the wrong country’s monsoon.
According to the news,
the trees have merely misplaced our dead.
Now she closes doors
as she once closed charred lips.
All around, homes glowing like rotten fruit.
Something sweet has turned and will not turn back. The trees stand still
as witnesses,
which is to say
they stand still burning
somewhere ahead of us,
their names not yet entered
into the report.