Editor’s Choice: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest

 

1979, after Carolyn Forché

 

You haven’t heard this one, but we were there. In the bright ugly room

behind a row of bald professors. It was April, and sticky. The plastic chairs

sucked at our thighs. Some dignitaries led her to the podium. She was just

a girl-poet, with her long blonde hair and flowy clothes, and all the easy

romance of being not too old but enough older than us. After the Chair

introduced her, she spoke in a voice so low we all leaned in. I was in his house.

His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. Some pipes clanked inside the walls.

Outside, through the open windows, frat boys were shouting. We were on

the inside now. We feared the colonel’s spoiled teenage children. The dog,

the American cop show. And— Don’t write about a pistol unless you intend

to use it, we knew at least this from our professors—the pistol on

the cushion by the colonel’s thigh. The poet’s words were candy tumbling

from a table; then, her voice dropped softer: our tongues on the dried peach

halves. Oh, I can tell you this now,

There is no other way to say this:

 

Metaphor is a tool of the wicked.

Metaphor presses against your skull, your nose squashed to the glass. The

window was never meant to open. The architects made it that way. On your side,

the Chair is paying attention. His nostril hair flutters with each bated exhalation.

The girl-poet will become famous. On the other side, the scene is vivid. An ear

unfurls in a glass of water. The ear is disconnected from the mind. On the glossy

tiled floor, a scattering of amputated ears “to the ground.” Life is a series

of amputations. You are mute as a nun in church. The girl beside you, who

cries easily about ideas, weeps with shame.

How can we go forward in this future? How can we go on?

---

Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver Magazine.

Editor’s Choice: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest

 

In my pocket, the shudder of a newborn marsupial.

Along my back, a stampede

 

of tiny mammoths stomping through snowdrifts,

plummeting down a precipice.

 

Between our legs, a convergence of ladybugs

seeking out aphids,

 

reappearing each Spring as if by magic, as if drawn

by the pointillists.  In my eyes,

 

two black holes born to feast on scattered light,

to render it absent.

 

My foraging fingers rifle through the typewriter,

are robins shedding feathers

 

to feed them into keys, ripping out the ribbon

with derricked beaks, nesting

 

in flocks of silence.  My skull glows from within,

is bioluminescent, cradles

 

this thinking prisoner of uncertainties accrued,

my embattled mind

 

a zigzagging chase, both a pack of stubborn hounds

& the foxes it pursues.

---

Jonathan Greenhause’s first poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), was the winner of the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Bayou, The Fish Anthology, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Permafrost.

Editor’s Choice: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest

 

and lightning and how if you count the seconds

between the flash and the rumble, you can tell how close

 

the sky is to becoming a guillotine. I once saw lightning split

a tree trunk in half. Thunder didn’t follow for another ten

 

seconds. Sand can turn to glass. Did you know that? Each shard

settles at the base of my spine. What happens when they no longer

 

keep me fused together? If I stare out of a car window long enough

will my reflection disappear completely? Would you will it to happen?

 

Yesterday, they recorded upside-down lightning in a Kansas town

and it reminded me of a long-downed tree in the local cemetery—

 

how it looks like a hand getting ready to pluck the tombstone

straight from the ground. I can’t remember the etched name

 

in the stone but I remember thinking how I wished it was mine.

For the storm to make me an offering: Say, here I’m going to shelter you

 

for a while. It’s not true what they say about remembering. The lobes

could be ripped out electrical cords, cause a surge—unpower what

 

I should have forgotten: your birth year, how you smelled on a Tuesday

afternoon, the drawn-out agony. I was once told that thunder was just god

 

and the angels bowling. How I listened for the cheers after each strike

of a pin. I’m still counting the seconds between entering this world

 

and being taken out. What I mean to say is when the thunderclap

sends the windows singing, I want my end to be a white-hot echo.

---

Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Button Poetry, Midway Journal, Kissing Dynamite, The Broadkill Review, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship, is a Best of the Net nominee, and volunteers for Button Poetry, Write or Die, and Variant Literature.

Honorable Mention: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest

 

1. you wish you had a body

 

like most birds: strong, supple, sharp.

But you left your claws behind

when you crawled out of the forest

 

 

2. so they thought you wanted to be soft,

which isn’t wrong, but—

 

3. In primary three science you learned

that all living things need air, food, and water.

 

You need a fourth: a sheet of skin that doesn’t burn

when you touch it. You need something a fruit knife

couldn’t cut through.

 

4. Christ, if you could fly

 

5. in this economy. You’d dart right out of this city

like a bullet. Rip all the fat and muscle

from your bones. Go back

to the beginning and drag the right body

out of the forest—

 

6. not red or yellow or even the purple

of grapes, of skin bruising under sunlight

 

but a fourth color. The color

of trees singing.

---

Liya Chang was born in Texas, grew up in Singapore, and returned to the United States for college. They study English, Dance, and Asian Studies at Swarthmore College. Poetry is one of their greatest joys and vices, through which they explore the wonders of being the third in everything: third culture kid, third gender, and third bird on the wire.

Honorable Mention: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest

 

I don’t hear the doctor at first

when she asks if I’ve been sleeping

better these nights, if I’ve cut back

on the raw fish, if the migraines

have subsided, because my mind

is gridlocked, caught between some weight

and height on the BMI chart

tacked on the wall of her office,

as if my body were hanging

there too.

That’s when I remember

some random bit of trivia,

how the first body mass index

was based on the weights of corpses,

and I laugh at the irony,

how all these years I’ve been striving

to be as fit as a dead man,

controlling portions, passing on

seconds or dessert, forgetting

how much I loved my wife’s brownies,

when she would dump an extra cup

of walnuts into the batter

because she knew I loved the crunch,

when we’d clear dishes together,

clean up our kitchen messes, those

memories so near, I try to

close my eyes around them, savor

my daily allowance of loss

as I try to get back those years

before that disappearing trick,

before I became a walking

cadaver.

I’m snapped back into

reality when the doctor

presses the stethoscope against

my skin, tells me to breathe, as though

I haven’t been. She asks again

if I’ve been sleeping more soundly

as she slides the cold drum across

the smooth map of my heart, tells me

to breathe deep, and again, and now

to just breathe normally, as if

that request were simple, as if

I have been overthinking it

these last few years, as if my lungs

hadn’t been at work all the while,

toiling against their master’s will.

---

Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). Individual poems have appeared in such venues as The Hollins Critic, Ninth Letter, Philadelphia Stories, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania.

Honorable Mention: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest

 

1

all the way back to when i was shrieking and my sister was too

pointing at juicy rhododendron

in the immigrant yard    ie the Big Opportunity bouquet

 

now move    i am consciously yearning

to get back to the hilarious of a near unknown    a toddler mind

of anticipation

 

2

motherboards    school districts  everything tightens

around revisionist history

its not mumbai or bombay  but new world

though what to un name

an implied no-name fate like urban boundary line

 

can we upend the field and the sea. no question

this this is not that different    yet another project of long violence

worshipped thru lead paint siding     plastic milk cups of petrichor

that seep out of the earth in the early morning

froglets that leap from feet falling on a sodden lawn

its not silicon valley but silicon forest

so sudden and devoid

inside this holding of white reserve and tact     please say only one thing

it is pastoral through its gnosis, no         it is a 90s network imaginary  no

 

it is a test site for arranged marriage casteist progeny

ibid assimilationist light skinned success story    ibid neoliberal

 imperial  generational  deep well

 

3

now we have no birth order

or gender adjustment for falsified belonging          we ruined it, gladly

no debt arrangement for time lost           for years never mine to begin with

now i move consciously into a chaos magic of yearning

its a hot to the touch jaggery scented transmission           here are my friends

that ive made   and some space to sit in the garden

---

Leena Joshi is an artist, educator, and child of immigrants living in Oakland, California. Leena’s written works can be found in SFMoMA’s Open Space, the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Felt, Monday: the Jacob Lawrence Gallery Journal, TAGVVERK, La Norda Specialo, Poor Claudia, and bluestockings magazine, among others. They hold an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley’s department of Art Practice and a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, Seattle.