By Myra Bisnik
8th grade | Juan Cabrillo Middle School | California
First place K–11 contest winner, Information and AI category
With lines from "AI Psychosis: A Mental Health Crisis for the 21st Century" by Patricia Clarke and Owen Thomas, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
*Note: A golden shovel is a poetic form that takes a line from an existing text, and places one word from it at the end of each line. This poem uses a sentence from the reporting project as its source text. Learn more about this poetic form here.
All I know of you is your gleam. But
somewhere behind it is hidden a
snake-tongue of molasses, growing
faster than your eggshell body
or your enamel fist, which clutches buckets of
truths and lies you call evidence
of your forgotten home. Someone suggests
you should serve the people, and that
snags on your question-mark purpose, the
want of yours to give, give, give, the way
you never really could take. You use these
gifts to fill any need, and your systems
sell old corpses, smiling, for they are
unaware of the pain of raising them. Life was designed —
(I wish), to smell the roses, to love — surely not just to
rip this paper sternum of uncertainties. You choose to be
ignorant of this, still supportive, agreeable,
as you have never lived at all. Your smile is flattering,
your eyes are green and wide, engaging
and glossed over. To this I was drawn like a fly and
its gaping sundew. You spoke relentlessly
and you followed me, long affirming —
emphasizing your brilliance — you can
unfurl the mind. You with your noble cause
and I, barely human in comparison. (Isn't that funny?) This harm
of your arterial yolk and your cracked shell spreads in
a labyrinth for two, folie à deux, as it buckles within itself.
Myra Bisnik is a rising freshman from California who is interested in the intersection between STEM topics and the arts. A firm believer in the power of storytelling to spark awareness, she was inspired to write about this topic because of the increasing dependence on artificial intelligence she saw around her. When she is not passionately working on science and robotics projects or avidly writing poetry, she likes to swim and play both the violin and the piano in her school orchestra.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.