By Noor Fatima
11th grade | Somerset County Vocational High School Academy | New Jersey
First-place K–11 contest winner, Global Health category
With lines from “The Vice of Spice: Confronting Lead-Tainted Turmeric” by Wudan Yan, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
Amma kept turmeric in a glass jar beside the salt,
a small sun with a metal lid, sealed into belief.
It entered everything without asking: rice, milk, lentils, skin, prayer,
the soft yellow bruise of tradition blooming under her thumbnail.
No one measured it for color was older than proof,
passed down by wrist, heat, and women who made hunger kneel.
In wedding rooms, it made daughters glow as if dawn had chosen them;
in sickrooms, warm milk learned mercy, and fear became drinkable.
So when the market learned to flatter yellow, no one heard the blade,
they only saw powder bright enough to counterfeit clean.
“Traders in Bangladesh used lead chromate to enhance the spice’s appearance.”
Appearance: the cleanest name for a dirty miracle,
a word that stands outside the body, swearing it never entered.
Not every harm announces itself with glass;
some arrive warm, stirred, fragrant, nearly forgiven.
“The problem had already gone global.”
Meaning the wound learned shipment, shelf life, translation,
meaning one village’s silence could sit in another country’s cabinet and wait.
Somewhere, a mother stirred love into a pot
and lifted the spoon toward the life she had sworn to keep.
Somewhere, the body kept the receipt.
Then science unscrewed the sun and found what the kitchen had no word for,
a quiet metal sleeping inside the color we called blessing.
The story says the lie fell “from 47 percent to 0 percent.”
Zero should have sounded like rescue,
but it stood there, like a mouth refusing to explain what happened before.
It remains on my tongue, not the yellow,
but the years that needed evidence before they became wrong.
The kitchen goes silent without changing shape.
The rice still softens.
The milk still warms.
Amma’s hand still finds yellow first.
And I do not stop her.
The spoon rises as yellow opens.
Appearance: the jar remains clean.
Somewhere, the hands that brightened it
have already reached
for something else.
Noor Fatima is a student at the Academy of Health and Medicine in New Jersey. She spends her time researching and studying; however, as a reward, she occasionally lets herself write poems in a little journal she has had since middle school. Having grown up between Pakistan, Switzerland, and the United States, and speaking seven languages, she has a lot going through her mind, and getting it out on paper serves as an escape. This poem in particular comes from her identity of coming from an immigrant household and her love for public health. Born in a village in Pakistan affected by unsafe drinking water, Noor has long been aware of how environmental harm can enter daily life quietly. Her writing often explores what is inherited through family, tradition, and the body.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.