RUNNER UP – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY
All Objects
by Brittanie Sterner
Here are feet on the floor of a plane over Omaha:
Here are swatches of ground turning into ground
Here is voice mail from an unknown number
Here is every computer-generated test
Here is waiting with glass
Here is middle-night
Here are foreheads touching here are hands in space
Here is rope
Here is the braid that makes the rope
Here is a death one day
Here is another death
Here is another death
Here is perched investment
Here are plot equations from above
Here are characters for land and love
Here is unstoppable weather
Here is a bowl of ocean
Here is food digesting
Here is top of the bottom
Here is morning, again
Here is wake with a ship on the tongue
Here is a mouth of fog
Here are rotaries of birds
Here beads traffic in rosaries
Here graves imitate trees in rows
Here is orchard
Here is fruit clung and hatched
Here is a basket
Here are hands applied over Omaha, braiding highways
Here lawns cropped in rectangles
Here tillers in bunches transit
Here an accident that didn’t make news
Here clipped migration
Here is lamp on a timer
Here letters spell electricity
Here is the room after leaving
Here is the light going off.
Brittanie Sterner has been writing poems since childhood. She holds a BFA in poetry from Emerson College and an MS in arts administration from Drexel University, and her storytelling research has been published in the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. She currently serves as the director of programming for One Book, One Philadelphia, a project of the Free Library of Philadelphia.