lizabeth Shvarts, a sixteen-year-old from Staten Island, was standing in the rain outside the Puma flagship store, in midtown, reciting a spoken-word poem to calm her nerves:

Mother pheasant pluckers will peck the eyes of
pleasant feather-fisted phuckers we lap dance
under lion’s gaze.

a person leaning out the window

It was Sunday, and at 10 a.m. a store manager ushered Shvarts inside and up a neon-lit escalator, past a mannequin wearing a Cooladapt tank top ($40) and Velocity Nitro shoes ($120). A microphone, a tripod, and a professional videographer awaited her arrival. “This is my first slam!” she said. “It’s nice to be doing something outside the house.” By ten-fifteen, Shvarts, who wore cuffed jeans and a denim jacket, had removed her mask, checked her lipstick on her iPhone’s camera, and begun to read:

My mother doesn’t smile in photos.
Nor does her mother—

A producer interrupted: Would it be possible for her to change into a complimentary Puma T-shirt? (All poets got sneakers and a T-shirt.) Shvarts obliged, and began again:

My mother doesn’t smile in photos.
Nor does her mother
Or her mother or her mother’s mother. At least, their mouths
Curl like upturned orange peels and if you trace your
Finger along our family tree the branches
Brachiate into generations of resting bitch-face—

The videographer interrupted: “I’m sorry, can you start over? They were moving the mannequins behind you!” Shvarts’s lip quivered as she waited for another mannequin to be hauled away. “Take a couple deep breaths, my love,” the producer said.

In normal times, the contest to join the New York City Poetry Slam Team is a sold-out performance held at the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem; this year, the twenty-second annual slam was virtual. The following week, a panel of judges—Flo Ngala (a personal paparazzo to Cardi B), Laura Stylez (a Hot 97 FM d.j.), J. Ivy (a poet who collaborates with Kanye West and Jay-Z), Kel Spencer (a Grammy-nominated multimedia exec), and Jasmine Mans (a slam-team alumna)—would select five teens for the city’s team.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

Shanelle Gabriel, the interim executive director at Urban Word NYC, which hosts the contest, wanted to duplicate the excitement of the Apollo online. Rather than have the twenty finalists appear via Zoom, from their bedrooms or fire escapes, she decided that the competitors would record their performances at the Puma store. “Everyone’s housing isn’t secure. We didn’t want to assume that everyone could create a quiet space to record their poem,” she said. “We also wanted to make sure there’s no cats running around in the background.”

By noon, a dozen poets had arrived. Several paced the sneaker section, frantically whispering their metaphors, anaphoras, and onomatopoeias to themselves; others scrolled TikTok. A few snapped approval as fellow-finalists recited pulsing trochees and accentual slant rhymes. Alex Guzman, a nervous sixteen-year-old who wore glasses held together with Scotch tape, wandered into an empty room at the back and bellowed his stanzas into the dark:

I’m not the caster kid, ghost top, casper lid
No one ever merciless
Always mercy that or mercy this
But never mercy kids
Give ’em more work cause life is merciless.

Across the store, Kai Giovanni, a high-school freshman from Bedford-Stuyvesant, who wore ripped jeans and hand-painted boots, joked around with their father, Thomas, an attorney for the City of New York. “He says crap all the time, and he doesn’t write it down, so I have to!” the poet said. The dad laughed.

At the mike, Meera Dasgupta—a former New York City Youth Poet Laureate, and the reigning National Youth Poet Laureate—introduced her poem. (Amanda Gorman, who performed at President Biden’s Inauguration, was the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017.) “I wrote this yesterday at 10 p.m.,” Dasgupta said. “I had a poem already memorized. I was ready, but I didn’t like it as much as I like this one”:

I am used to being watched like prey, something to be hunted.
As an Indian American woman, you don’t have to tell me to
Cover my skin because I learned to fear being brown before
I learned to fear being woman.
When my mother plans my wedding while every day, I plan my funeral.
Wear makeup and dress like a boat that has found a broken lighthouse at the shore.
Smiling as I swim towards you, the jagged rocks.
Smiling like another stranger.
Another daughter.
Another lover.
Another sister.
Smiling like a second on the evening news.

When she finished, a young man in white Yeezys shouted, “Damn, whaaaat? Damn!” He offered an elbow bump. ♦