By Shloka Ashveena Mayank
11th grade | Neerja Modi School | Jaipur, India
Finalist in the K–11 contest, Global Health category
With lines from “Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease” by Krithika Varagur, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
We inherit the language
before the consequence:
AA. AS. SS.
Three arrangements of sound,
clean as initials,
clean as answer keys.
You tell me your genotype
like a fact already burdened
by its own future.
Inheritance is said to be simple,
as straightforward as a Punnett square
from a middle school biology textbook.
Four obedient boxes,
the arithmetic of bodies
rendered legible.
No box accounts for aftermath.
Not for love,
which enters without permission
and stays.
Your blood has its own geometry:
soft discs into rigid crescents,
matter made difficult,
form collapsing inward
under invisible instruction.
After this,
I notice curvature everywhere—
the hooked bend of your spine
when pain arrives,
the way hours warp around it,
time no longer passing
but clotting.
They call it crisis,
a word that implies a sudden break.
But this is not a surprise;
it is the architecture of the marrow,
a structural debt
called due.
We speak in sanctioned vocabularies:
risk, carrier, management.
“A 50 percent chance”—
a phrase precise enough
to impersonate certainty.
It divides the future cleanly,
not into children, but probabilities;
not into names, but percentages
large enough to haunt,
small enough to justify hope.
Elsewhere, someone has concluded us:
“Don’t risk it.”
A sentence dressed as prudence.
As if love were merely
a poorly timed decision,
solvable before attachment
complicates the equation.
Before a person becomes
less hypothetical
than the warning issued against them.
But you have already happened.
You entered my life
with the irreversibility
of an event already in motion—
gravity, weather, impact.
In waiting rooms, the language narrows:
“steady-state,”
a phrase so deceptively calm
it almost disguises its meaning.
“Extending the steady-state period between crises,”
as though a life might be measured
not by its fullness,
but by the negotiated distance
between interruptions.
Responsibility, they tell us,
is foresight sharpened into refusal:
to choose against what has not yet formed,
to prevent what might inherit difficulty.
To love with sufficient discipline,
or not at all.
Yet the future is present
in the pressure of your hand
closing around mine.
In a body remembering
what it did not choose,
in our continued failure
to become theoretical.
Somewhere, they are still drawing squares,
trusting borders to contain outcome.
But nothing essential stays contained.
Not blood. Not time. Not desire.
We do not say forever.
Only this: today was given.
You are here.
And love, despite every attempt
to render it calculable,
remains stubbornly
outside the box.
Shloka Ashveena Mayank is a student, writer, and avid reader who believes that literature and media have the power to shape how we see the world, and, hopefully, inspire us to change it. She enjoys writing, exploring creative ideas, and finding stories in everyday life. When she's not reading or drawing, she's probably sleeping …or deciding which dessert deserves to be eaten next.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.