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Tapestry Room

EDITORS’ CHOICE – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Tapestry Room

by Rebecca Levi

 

I decided to write my feelings big and hang them on the walls.

They didn’t fit inside me anymore, like that fever dream when

I was all I had for myself and it was already too much.

So I started picking apart Flemish tapestries, seventeenth

century, the thread faded in diagonal stripes, the greens pale-

skinned. Borrowed a loom. Practiced words like warp and shuttle. Nights I’d hear

clacking but by morning I’d wake to silence; the room’s acoustics

were always mysterious. It was quite a grand hall, the grandest

I could find, but it felt close around me. Like a den, or a Nap

Place. Lamps turned to dull. I learned to count time in rows of weft, not to

look at what I wove; feelings can’t be seen head-on till they’re ready.

I scoured my psyche for the strangest unnameable, wrapping each

round the bobbin. Got them all. When I pumped the treadle the fibers

throbbed together like piano strings, and I’d think of the insects

that died to make the reds. Afternoons I’d lie on my stomach, tap

my calluses on the tile; they clicked like tiny booted footsteps

in the steady shadows. It was like this a long time, till the thread

ran out. The walls trembled with new cloth. That day I looked up at last

at my thirteen-foot feelings, their snow-globe eyes, their whale bellies, hands

the size of my skull, and watched them dim behind the electric light.

 

Rebecca Levi is a musician, poet, and translator often on the road, often in Colombia. Her work has appeared in places like Columbia Journal, No Tokens Journal, and Your Impossible Voice, and she is a contributor to “If You’re Not Happy Now,” forthcoming with Broadstone Books this March. Her poem “December 31st” won third place in the 2018 Mick Imlah Poetry Prize at The Times Literary Supplement.

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

EDITORS’ CHOICE – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

by R.G. Evans

 

Does he whistle as he sweats and groans

the boulder up the mountain?

Does he ever think At least i’m not at home

where my daughter wants to die

trembling  there at the summit

just before the rock rolls down?

As he follows it, his mind might wander

to the time his daughter screamed

Sixteen years in this goddamn house

with your failed marriage as my roommate!

What did she know about what god has damned?

Maybe he smokes, letting gravity do its job

one step at a time. Eternity is eternity after all,

no room here for a goldbricking soul.

If one can imagine Sisyphus happy,

it isn’t hard to picture him grinding his butt

beneath his toe, cracking his knuckles,

and glancing at Tantalus in his lake

beneath the trees, bending as the water recedes.

And yet, Sisyphus wonders,

was that a wink he saw from his damned neighbor

when the fruit pulled away out of reach?

At least the bastard’s in the shade, he thinks

and shrugs his flesh into the stone.

R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Poetry Press Prize 2013), The Holy Both (Main Street Rag), and The Noise of Wings (Red Dashboard Press). His debut album of original songs, Sweet Old Life, was released earlier this year and is available on most streaming services. www.rgevanswriter.com.

Bruce

HONORABLE MENTION – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Bruce

by Chad Frame

Chad.Frame

Outside, it’s scarcely my sixteenth

winter, pacing the drive, unsure

what’s led here—hours of typing,

the heyday of dialup chatrooms,

 

a torso photo, a phone call

to calm my jangling nerves—me out

the door, you on your way to pick

me up. Only the sparse, dead trees,

 

thinning hair on the hilltop’s scalp,

are watching when your car rattles

to a stop, your cracked face an old

catcher’s mitt slowly catching fire

 

within, spewing cigarette smoke.

Terrified, more of backing out

than anything, I creak the door

open and climb inside. We go.

 

Later that night, I am retching

in the bathroom when my mother

comes home from work. I do not tell

anyone there are parts of me

 

that will never shake free, never

be grown out of or eased into,

will never be the same again,

because they do not come from me.

 

This day I have learned to swallow

more than you, more than pride or Coke

straight from the two-liter bottle

to cleanse the taste—the hardest thing

 

to swallow is the idea

that there will be no second chance

at a first time. Persephone,

trapped in winter, aching for spring,

 

must realize because she swallows

her captor’s seed she can never

feel the sun, her mother’s plain face

bearing the promise of flowers.

Chad Frame was the 2017 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County and is a founding member of the No River Twice poetry improv troupe. He is also the poetry editor of Ovunque Siamo: New Italian-American Writing and co-founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. Chad has been published in various journals, including decomP, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth,and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, as well as featured on the radio program The Poet and the Poem hosted by Grace Cavalieri in association with the Library of Congress.

Phantom Limb

HONORABLE MENTION – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Phantom Limb

by Fran Baird

Fran Baird

I trash the bird feeder,

scatter the seeds away from the house.

As the exterminator predicted,

the scratching in the crawl space goes away.

The birds return for days,

stare up into the air, fly around

the empty space like lost migrants,

then disappear and don’t return.

My son calls from his chaos.

I am drawn once again

to hover around his sadness,

as if I still could care.

This time, when I return home,

something in me is missing.

 

Fran Baird was born in North Philly, the youngest of 12 children. He has studied in workshop with poets David Ignatow, Cathy Smith Bowers, John Drury, Jamey Dunham; and currently with Leonard Gontarek. His poem “Neshaminy” published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal in 2009 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first chapbook, Painting With My Father, has been published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Dr. Baird conducts a poetry workshop with long term incarcerated men at Phoenix Prison (formerly Graterford) as part of the Prison Literacy Project of Pennsylvania. Ten poems from five poets from this workshop were published in the Fall 2017 Schuylkill Valley Journal (V45).

Post Rehab

HONORABLE MENTION – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Post Rehab

by Claire Scott

Claire.Scott

they taught us to pray     mother    to our lord

jesus for strength to refuse

 

the call of meth of vodka of vicodin

to call our sponsor eat three

 

meals a day fresh berries    mother

& broccoli run a mile each morning

 

they say keep a gratitude journal

pages filled with purple ink

mother     mine is empty

 

midnight visitors to keep money

coming to keep me in needles

mother     & crystal meth

 

mother     I can’t wait any

speed no longer

rehab has ruined

 

I pour another glass, fill a syringe

drinking darkness as jesus

dances on the cross

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

How To Read Whitewater in the Mid-Atlantic Region

RUNNER UP – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

How to Read Whitewater in the Mid-Atlantic Region

by Kimberly Andrews

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Here’s the gift, the undetermined, toothy space in which it bubbles

up crazily, thrashing around and telling you incessantly about

 

the nature of possibility: these terrible courtships, in other words,

you’ve had with rivers, their greenish syntax letting all the silk

 

slip to the floor. Susquehanna, Lehigh, Youghigheny, their stolen

clauses, the low trees trailing their fingers as if to say there now

 

river, there now. And in the little canoe, you sound out each line

in turn. This is the side of you that is full of eagles. The story

 

unfolds in several keenly observed parts: eddies in their indecision.

Standing waves like stacks of letters, each signed fondly.

 

Undercut rocks against which the water boils low and smooth,

dangerous in the same way that simplicity is dangerous—

 

You read for answers because the painted ceiling above you

demands a key to its own reflection. You read for the sluice

 

because you are normal: you ask for directions, you are

standard in that finally, you favor the tongue harbored between

 

the wide-set molars, the sunlight bouncing off of a body

shaped like allowance, like the valleys you dare to call your home.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is also the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the 2018 Akron Prize for Poetry and forthcoming from the University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Washington College, and you can find her on Twitter at @kqandrews.

Nine-Year-Old Suicide In Reverse

RUNNER UP – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Nine-Year-Old Suicide in Reverse

for Jamel Myles

by Chad Frame

Chad.Frame

 

A candle unsnuffs, its smoke drawn back in,

its guttering, finger width flame relit.

The bright blue JanSport rises from the floor

and hooks its straps around your slight shoulders.

 

You dart backwards down the carpeted stairs.

The door unslams. The yellow bus backs up

around the cul-de-sac. Your eyes unclench.

The children suck words back away from you.

 

High-fletched F, its bulbless semiquaver.

Lofty A, its slopes unassailable.

Selfsame, cliquish GG, backs turned to shun.

Surprised O, rolling, caught up in all this.

And T, the final, burning cross of it.

 

That morning, unknowing, your mother smiles,

untousles your hair like wind smoothing grass,

and sits. Inky clouds of coffee billow

past her pursed lips like possessing spirits.

 

All Objects

RUNNER UP – THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

All Objects

by Brittanie Sterner

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.

Elegy For Breath

 

WINNER OF THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY

Elegy For Breath

by Carlos Andres Gomez

Carloslaughing_PoetryContestWinner

Picture the adolescent: mimicking

what makes him worthy. Pick his

most potent snapshot for click-

bait: fresh-faced but mean-

mugging; same mask I’d pull

clean across my jaw for any

Polaroid of me & my best friend

in eighth grade. Let’s be clear: joke

stance—now used to justify

killing          make just     the just-

snuffed, just clumsy youth branded

bold-fonted & blood thirst. Peace

sign transmogrified to gang sign—

since the expert talking head

confirmed it. The expert talks &

confirms inside a rectangular frame

that renders most of him invisible.

Talks & confirms        two bullet-

points         from the bleached-

teeth interviewer. But nowhere

is the testimony of       breath

stifled, the practiced hands that

remained watched whenever they

ascended, whether in prayer or

surrender, holding a bag of groceries,

a cell phone, or a son. Nowhere

is that last sigh  freed  from his tired

lungs as the sixth shot   struck

the base of his skull    sprinting

with back turned. The neighbor describes

that final sound I did not hear   & yet

cannot   unhear. It is suddenly the last

sound I hear from too many people

I love: my brother-in-law, my four

nephews, my high school best friend,

my infant son. (Every police officer

is out in the world       defending

himself. Every one of them describes

the nightmares in which they see

a dark object against the darkness

that turns into fire & populates a rigid

void with lead. Every police officer

is a human being. He makes mistakes

sometimes. He got nervous. He thought

about his two kids & his pregnant wife,

it was fourteen days before retirement.

He’s never missed a Sunday at church.

Believe me, it’s true. I’ve seen him pass

the donation plate. Sometimes

he takes a naked, crumpled bill in his

calloused hands, wipes the sweat

& residue on his crotch.) I saw Jesus

on Easter Sunday        still  resting

on the wall, a hooded sweatshirt

draped across his torso from the college

he was to attend  just to make it all a bit

more decent. Everything you stare into

becomes a fist, a loaded weapon aimed

at your face. I wake up in a country

based on a single document made

to protect   every human being   equally

who is a wealthy, white man. The woman

I meet after my show in Myrtle Beach,

South Carolina has no response when

I ask her why the killing of three dogs

made her protest, made her write letters,

made her boycott, while the murder

of a defenseless Black child inspired

not a single word   from her lips?

Loud music; blocking the middle of an empty

residential street; a wallet in a trembling,

outstretched palm; a back sprinting away

in fear; a woman after a car accident

knocking on a door for help; a toy

rifle in a Walmart in Ohio; a boy

in Money, Mississippi, walking, lost

in thought, a stutter from Polio, a whistle

he learned to cope with his stammer,

when the implication of    Blackness

is always absolution     from murder.

My son’s first breath was with-

held: the cord that had nourished him

for nine months now choked   three

times   around his throat, as he fought

for life. Like his sister  at birth. Like

the father  on a sidewalk in Staten

selling cigarettes to support his six kids

to survive  born fighting  stayed fighting

to breathe. When my son   gasped

finally  & then slumbered into dream,

his blooming tenderness  unguarded  as

a single orchid, I said a silent prayer

for the imagined crimes his world was busy

inventing, to condemn him  for being born

Black   & having the courage   to breathe.

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and the author of Hijito, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize. Winner of the 2018 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, 2018 Sequestrum Editor’s Reprint Award in Poetry, 2015 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, Rattle, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. For more, please visit: CarlosLive.com.

Seaming

Seaming

by Kara Petrovic

Kara_Petrovic_Profile

My mother holds me down, her hands locked around my wrists as I am screaming, writhing in pain. It is midnight, or sometime after. The fluorescent lights of my room feel too bright, they burn against my skin, cursed with hypersensitivity. I can hear my mother cooing at me, gently whispering it is time to stop. Covered in cold sweat, my skin is slick, and my hair sticks to my forehead. This is a snapshot of my life at its lowest, which happens more often than I care to admit. It is a panic attack, or something similar, some days I cannot tell the difference. Yet, with unyielding patience, my mother hears my screams and we go into our usual song and dance: where my hands are scratching at my skin as if I were digging for gold, and her hands are petting my head, snaking their way around my body to make me still.
–

My mother never really understood mental illness, not when it first crept into my bed and made itself a home. She thought I was attention-seeking, the youngest child tired of raising their voice just to be heard, that this was the newest of my attempts to gain her affection. My mother thought she could shake it out of me, that if she grabbed me by my shoulders enough times or slapped me across the face hard enough I would snap out of it and be the child she had envisioned.

I am 22 years old now, and I have a cornucopia of diagnoses, all of which seem to be trying to outdo the other. In my youth, I was a lost soul — to put it kindly. A fire raged in my chest while a demon followed my every footstep: I was enamored with death.
If death was a man, with sickly grey skin and bones for fingers, he followed me throughout my adolescence, before I even knew how to correctly spell suicide. At 12 years old, I would write notes to my mother and leave them on the threshold of her bedroom, apologizing for being the way that I was, stating I knew she would be better off if I were dead.

I would watch her read these notes, hidden behind the pillars in the house. With the scoff of a laugh accompanied by a quick roll of her eyes, her staple response to my behavior, she would crumple the paper up. To her, this was a cry for attention, and I suppose in some way it was. It was also a cry for help, one she would make me wait several years to receive.
Meanwhile, I played surgeon with myself. I seemed to believe that if I cut deep enough I could find the source of my sickness and remove it from my skin. Since I had to eradicate this on my own, I had to navigate without a sense of direction. I would lock myself in my room and map out the corners of my brain, go hunting in the depths of my subconscious to try and locate the cause of my misery. At the dollar store, I would buy razors, take them home and break apart the safety barriers. I would mark up my arms, my legs, my stomach. I experimented at first, marking Xs all over my skin, but it quickly became methodical lines and, each new session, I challenged myself to dig even deeper.

–

A therapist once told me that the pain I carry is liquid gold, and it fills up the cracks inside of me and creates a new work of art each time— I stare at my pain and try to see the beauty in it, in its curves and twists, the knots in my forearms and the scars on my body. All I see are cracks. White lines that look nothing like gold. I trace my fingertips along the hypertrophic scars and, suddenly, I am engulfed in loneliness and vulnerability. Though I want nothing more than to hold on with an iron fist, I let go of the abyss and tell myself the wounds have healed. Yet they burn each time I see someone trying not to stare.

My mother believes pain can be expunged, as if my pain and I should separate. My mother says happiness is a choice. I promise I am trying to choose happiness every day, but maybe the words stick in my throat, maybe I’m so used to excelling as her disappointment that I can no longer tell the difference.

–

I am fifteen years old and I have been living with an unnamed illness for three years. It’s November, 2011, and my sister and I are setting up the Christmas tree. My parents are still together, out for the evening at a concert, desperately hoping this date night will save their marriage. At some point in the evening, my lungs and heart plummet in my chest and my mind repeats one track. I sneak into my parents’ bedroom and find my father’s sleeping pills I had stumbled upon several weeks prior. I read the label with care, noting all the warnings. “Do not operate machinery. Take with food. Do not consume with alcohol.”

Do not consume with alcohol.

Before I know it, I’m standing in front of the liquor cabinet, 26 pills in hand. I look through my options, and settle on the one with the highest alcohol content: tequila. I down the pills, chase them with the tequila, in seconds. The alcohol burns my throat, my body contorts in protest and I shiver as it enters my stomach. For a moment, nothing happens.

I walk upstairs into my bedroom. I pick out the outfit I would like to be found in: I change my shirt. I put one leg into my favorite pair of jeans.
When I wake up, I’m in the hospital. My mouth is black, covered in charcoal, and there are light burn marks on my chest. My mother sits across the room from me. Her thumbnail is in her mouth. She has been crying but when she realizes I am awake, her face hardens. I can hardly hear anything; the world is muted. She draws near and kneels by my bed. Her brown eyes I inherited are cold. “Listen,” she says, “there will be a psychiatrist who comes to see you. You must listen to me. You must lie. You must not tell the truth. If you do, you will be hospitalized and this will ruin your life.”

Ruin my life.

She coaches me, over and over, on the things I have to say. I stand up groggily and stumble towards the bathroom. She follows me, stands behind me, watching as I wash my face. She follows me back into the room, saying, “This was a mistake, an accident, you didn’t know what you were doing.”

“This wasn’t an accident,” I say, wincing as the words make their way from my throat.

“Don’t be stupid. You must tell the psychiatrist, ‘no, I don’t have a history of this type of behavior.’”

When the psychiatrist visits me the following day, I say,  “I made a mistake. It was an accident. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

I answer, “No, I don’t have a history of this type of behavior.”

When my 24 hours are up, I am released, and the next day I go to school as if I hadn’t just died two days prior.
This becomes a standard play for us. The following year I make the same attempt. I steal painkillers, head to the liquor cabinet, swallow tequila. Again, I wake up in the hospital and follow the same script. When it happens again, and again, and again, we eventually manage to avoid going to the hospital, and it is my mother’s turn to play doctor. As she wraps gauze around my wrists when I am 17 years old, her lips in a hard line though the rest of her face has softened over the years, I note her expertise: it had always been second-nature to her, healing my physical wounds in ways she could not mend the disorders in my mind.
Somewhere along the way, without much notice or declaration, everything changes. I have moved out and am living an hour’s drive away. We see each other on weekends. Some weekends I skip. I ignore my mother’s messages, her phone calls, and the more I do, the more they increase in frequency. No longer does she look at me with disdain. On this visit, I am 19 years old, sitting on the porch and smoking a cigarette with my mother. Even when we are the same, both smokers, we are different. She smokes thin sticks, I smoke 100s.

She asks, “How are you doing?”

I say, “Better than I have in years.”

I look toward the setting sun as she flinches. I flick my cigarette away. The conversation is strained, painful, and I’m checking my phone at five-minute intervals; waiting for when I can take my train to a home that is no longer with her. She sends me care packages, tells me not to worry so much, kisses my forehead, and I realize this is the most attention I have gotten from her in years. Except now, I think, I no longer need it. I am independent, grown, away from her. I am eating healthy, sleeping well, saving money. For all intents and purposes, I am well and stable.
But I am not cured.
The illness returns.

I find myself coming home more and more. My mother welcomes this. We have a family dinner every Sunday, just the two of us, and I can see the happiness etched into her face. I feel her warmth for the first time in years, and I suddenly begin to loathe when it is time for me to return to my house.

At the end of the year, I move back home and nestle myself into her. She calls me baby, and reminds me that the world is not my enemy, and neither is my mind. I realize, then, that finally: neither is she.
–

My mother never understood mental illness, no, but she grew to accept me. We had lived in parallel, traveling in the same direction, never once touching. In the years that followed my first splitting of skin, I learned to come to terms with my mind. My darker inclinations left shadowy traces on me that I have filled with gold. My body is a work of art I cherish, each mark a reminder not of my lowest, but of what I have survived. I fell out of love with my own melancholy. In ways unclear to me, my mother did the same.

–
My mother holds me down. After a few minutes, my breathing evens out and my tears dry themselves on my face.

That night, we sleep together, cocooned around each other and still.

Kara Petrovic is 23 years old and is currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a survivor of trauma three times over and are living with a variety of mental health disorders. They have been writing poetry since they were 8 years old. In 2017, they self-published a collection titled beyond rock bottom. Their poetry has been previously published by CONKER magazine. In 2018, they were selected to read for Toronto’s Emerging Writers Series. They are also currently writing a book of fiction with a co-author who lives in Belleville, New Jersey. Philadelphia holds a special place in their heart, as their father and youngest sister live there. They identify as genderfluid and pansexual.