By Eleanor Greene Intern, IMLS IMLS salutes the country’s first National Student Poets. IMLS and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) partnered with the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists & Writers to create the National Student Poets Program, which bestows the nation’s highest honor for youth poets whose original work exhibits exceptional creativity, dedication to craft, and promise. We continue our series that showcases the writings of the five National Student Poets. Each student poet represents the region they live in. Today’s featured poet represents the Southeast. Luisa Banchoff of Arlington, Va., has defined her young life by giving back to her community through poetry. She has led a project in three Arlington schools that connects students with each other and with poetry through interactive writing on school bulletin boards. As an active, 10-year member of the Girl Scouts, she earned her Gold Award when she led a poetry workshop for fifth-graders at her former elementary school. From April 25-27,  Luisa was a featured guest at Writers of Social Justice: How One Pen Changes the World, part of the Red Mountain Writing Project in Birmingham, Alabama. She engaged in a reading and writing workshop with high school students, and participated in an additional reading at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Below is Luisa Banchoff’s “A Thing of Beauty.” A Thing of Beauty Some places where you buy it they cover it in ribbon, little spilling meridians made sharp by scissors and your desire for it, the edges a peculiar geometry between your fingers, running it over like jukebox buttons that only play those kinds of songs, those memories that would be 1960s dust were it not for the press of it against your palm now. Your grandson’s eyes tell you life is a calendar. The small print on the receipt says it’s November. Sometimes when you shake it you can hear bells ring, sometimes a muffled five p.m. sigh or the sound of your daughter swallowing the moon for the first time.  Most people, they know that sound, they remember how it once slid down their own throats, how it never quite felt like the cinderblocks that are anchored there now, the what-a-shames and should-have-beens. So they focus on the ribbons instead, jumping like a four year-old’s hair in the elevator, landing like a forgotten puzzle piece under the table. Most people, they unwrap it right away, but I have occasionally seen the ones who live in apartment entryways and empty pool bottoms who still have not cracked at the rims. By day they shuffle with it between their feet. At night they shake it in time to their music, singing of saltwater that does not come from the sea as the world slowly drifts into some kind of sleep.