"Older Sister to Younger Brother" by Jules Vázquez (Cumberland County Winner, Grand Prize Winner)

Recently my younger brother smells unfamiliar

He leaves with little to no warning 

And returns with the lingering scent of grass stains, sweat,

And someone else’s living room on his sweater 

He walks out quickly and clean 

Returning with a mature, teenage kind of mud on his knees 

In the beds of his fingernails rests paint and dirt

I can feel him tearing away from our mother 

Ready to take on the vastness of his future 

Without me or our cozy loft beds to return to

I wish I had missed him this much when he was small and moldable

As foolish as it sounds maybe he’d want to stay 

Where blood was stronger than any friendship 

And our whole world was our messy bedroom floor

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Jules Vázquez, of South Portland, is a sophomore at Baxter Academy for Technology and Science and a ballerina with Maine State Ballet. They wrote “Older Sister to Younger Brother” to showcase sibling bonds. They are an active environmentalist, having co-founded a municipal initiative to plant fruit trees in their community addressing two prevalent issues: food insecurity and climate change. They are a descendant of the Taino, the people of first contact with European settlers as they made their way across the Atlantic. *Jules’s poem is the overall winner of The Telling Room’s 2023 Statewide Writing Contest.