Language arts educators who teach Latino English language learners know that part of their job is to help students learn to distinguish between the vernacular varieties of Spanish (or Mandarin, or Portuguese, or Swahili), English they use at home, and the school varieties of language expected in the classroom and in other professional and institutional contexts. Poetry and the arts can be important tools for exploring different linguistic and cultural worlds. In this article, the author as a scholar in the field of bilingualism and an emerging poet, combines data gathered from open-ended interviews with bilingual youth with her own experiences as a teacher, researcher, and creative writer through the process of scholARTistry. The testimonies from bilingual youth have illustrated that one's degree of language expertise is not fixed. Rather, bilingual abilities shift according to context, interlocutor, and subject. These youths' testimonies combined with poetic explorations can help bilingual and monolingual teachers foster multi-literacy in their classrooms. The author concludes that reading, living, and writing poetry are three scholARTistic ways to cross cultural and linguistic worlds and can be a form of professional development for language teachers dealing with bilingual youths.