If we have at least

By

An Phương Nguyen
11th grade | Delta Global School | Vietnam
Finalist, Human Rights category

With lines from "Domestic Violence Is Cost of Climate Change for Sri Lankan Women" by Dimuthu Attanayake, a Pulitzer Center reporting project

I.
If we have at least
a little bit of water,
We can farm paddy
one season, and grow
pulses in the next, and
the earth might remember
how to hold us—
how my mother once cupped
a handful of red clay,
whispered breathe
to the paddy shoots
curled like infants' hands.

The sky is a fist clenching
around its last drop,
and the skin on a man’s knuckles
is as dry as drought.

II.
There is sweetness rotting
under her skin,
black and blue with the scent
of over-ripe fruit where
no-one cares to look,
on her ribs, over her heart,
behind her door where
the hinge still whimpers
from last night's drought.

If not from the sky, rain will
come from his hands, and the sky’s fist
tightens around her eyes
to squeeze out
every
last
drop.

III.
If we have at least
this sun under our tongues,
so bright it chars the backs
of our teeth and the roofs—
still, we swallow light whole,
let it pool in our bellies:
molten kithul treacle
golden and glutinous,
too thick for their coarse palates,
too sweet for mouths
that only know how to name
the salt of our wounds.

At the station,
the sergeant's fan stirs
our words into paper moths
that beat themselves dead
against the hot glass
of crumbling, crumbling
indifference.

IV.
I dream of water flowing through
my body, a rice paddy, like rivers—
and things, beautiful things that sprout
from my palms and yours, sister,
rice and kangkung and jackfruit and

The water knows
how we once cupped entire monsoons
in the hollows of our collarbones,
how even now, our bodies
remember the exact weight
of a single drop
before it joins the flood.

V.
If we have at least
this dreaming, we wake
with mud still clinging to our ankles,
the earth's stubborn braille
telling us: Here. Here is where
the water will return.
Our bare soles read: Here—
where the broken tank’s ribs
arch toward heaven,
here— where the last
firefly pulses
against a widow’s shutters,
here is where the water
will rise to meet our palms
like a repentant lover
kissing each callus.

We plant our grief
upside down in the dust
and wait for the roots
to remember the sky.

VI.
Sister, if they cut us open,
they’ll find whole forests
pressed inside our marrow,
petals fossilized in the vertebrae
where we bent to lift
what the earth would not yield;
where ruptured blood flowered
purple and dull, brilliant black.
The coroner will murmur rare
as the last fireweed
unfurls from our throats.

A profession
in the tongue of scorched things:
We tried to grow,
even here.

An Phương is a rising senior at Delta Global School in Hanoi, Vietnam. She is interested in the emotional and cultural legacies carried in language, land, and the body. Her work is shaped by oral histories, folklore, and the poetry of resistance. She is honored for her work to be recognized by the Pulitzer Center.

Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.