{"id":6430,"date":"2022-05-18T15:36:10","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T22:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/?p=6430"},"modified":"2022-05-18T15:36:10","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T22:36:10","slug":"2022-poetry-contest-winners-announced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/2022-poetry-contest-winners-announced\/","title":{"rendered":"2022 Poetry Contest Winners Announced!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h3>\n

CONGRATULATIONS TO SAMUEL SAMBA, WAYNE LEE, GRACE CAVALIERI AND OJO TAIYE (first, second, third and fourth place winners respectively).<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

Samuel Samba \u2014 1st place<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Nebulous Strike in Minnesota<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Six months into prepartum trauma, I occupied the alley,
\ntummy-red & indecent with blood clotting fiercely like
\niridescent fog on a Sunday, as I irony my way into a female talk
\nwith my godmother. Her passion for poetry, squeezed
\nfrom tonight’s sharp want, to cause a small miracle of breeze and
\nnebulous strike in Minnesota\u2014
\nwhose landscape toughens with maple wood snow ridden by
\nthe thickest
\npang of dust: monsoon flatulence. a gas breaking on my elephant feet.
\nI kegel in the warmth, memorizing the old baobab plant potted by my foster
\nfather, whose mortgage
\nexceeds a headcount & by all means, indebts we\u2014 his descendants and
\nall our afterbears. Loan, beyond estimate sits nameless as a scattered blood
\nright we inherit with caution.
\nthe curse we put a face to, as banks flag down our surname. Right here,
\ntaking my godmother
\nto the moon and back with a love poem, I tongue distance\u2014 the length of
\na metaphor.
\nher uplifting to the chorus, desperate for a rising. The way the fetus
\ninside me attains weightlessness,
\nmanly afloat in baritone pulse, the vibe that brings life to rectum.
\nTell me about birth, my traveling, my approach to language in concealed
\nweightlessness
\nof a lost flesh: days I cribbed in my godmother’s hut. red clay,
\nprinting its brutal remarks on my turned back. my feet,
\nsashaying the railing my foster father fixed decades
\nback, in the timely fashion
\nof a stone coffin\u2014 durable in its wearing out. from the audible distance
\nof a co-wife, the shout fills me with monsoon, ruptured breath.
\na daggered flatulence,
\nreleased in the harmful custom of a birthing, reeling
\nthe way the fetus folds, clenching its shapeless fist while I stabilize my
\neager, worn-out breath to suit the calmness of township:
\nmy Iowa dreams, exaggerated everywhere across the border
\nholding those who raised me. I dragged my skin like an animal,
\nthroughout three cardinal points\u2014 till my
\nluck went South. A wanderer, unsettled by the inner works of clime.
\nunable to language in clearly distilled allomorph
\nI’m torn apart by grammar. the manner of its safe delivery, stuck
\nbetween my thighs.
\nWoman, if not anything, a terror gadget, surviving pills & the messy
\ncontractions, to forge a replica from her fallen relic.
\nWoman, if not anything
\nuncontained as the whirlwind. a neat violence, stretched across a
\nyoung navel withstanding all harms thrown at it:
\nthe tactics of a warfare.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Samuel Samba<\/p>\n

\n

Wayne Lee \u2014 2nd place<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Little Bird<\/h4>\n

Pizza.
\nCorn dogs.
\nTater tots.<\/p>\n

Transfixed before the frozen-food case
\nin the Chugiak supermarket,
\nall Tatiana sees is her own reflection:
\nthe dark-haired girl in cormorant-skin parka
\nand seal-hide mukluks, walking the black sand beaches
\nof Atka, twelve hundred miles out the Aleutian chain.
\nThe little girl jigging for black cod,
\ncatching char in the crick with her bare hands,
\nspeaking Unangax with her elders, dancing
\ntheir hunting and fishing stories every day.<\/p>\n

Pogi.
\nTrout.
\nSea urchin.<\/p>\n

Sakuchax, she whispers to the brown face in the glass.
\nHer Aleut name. Little Bird.
\nLike everyone else on the rock, a cross
\nof indigenous and Orthodox.<\/p>\n

She fingers the food stamps in her hoodie pocket,
\nremembers wild plants she knew to pick,
\nanimals she used to track. Days when the men
\npulled a sea lion up on the beach,
\nall eighty villagers coming down to watch,
\nto get their communal share of the catch.<\/p>\n

Muscles.
\nLimpets.
\nClams.<\/p>\n

Her fingers trace the family tattoo on her forearm.
\nThe scar where the ivory labret pierced her lower lip
\nforty days after her first cycle. The hands that learned
\nby beading, baking, gathering.<\/p>\n

Wild celery.
\nCrowberries.
\nChocolate lilies.<\/p>\n

The feet she had to drag to class in the city
\njust outside Anchorage, a single classroom bigger
\nthan the schoolhouse back home.
\nNo dance practice, no elders to talk to.
\nForgetting her native words.
\nIn trouble for glancing down
\ninstead of looking her teachers in the eye.
\nFeeling lied to, told her people were never enslaved
\nin the Pribilofs for the fur seal harvest.<\/p>\n

Reindeer.
\nPuffin.
\nPtarmigan.<\/p>\n

Now in Chugiak she mostly misses the fresh fish,
\nthe hot bread, piroshkis with rice.
\nEven the snowmobile ride to St. Nicholas Church
\nin the worst of winter storms.
\nEverything she doesn\u2019t see in her image.<\/p>\n

Little Bird opens the freezer door, unsheathes
\nher whale-bone knife, cuts out halibut cheeks,
\ncarves raw chitin from their shells, spreads
\nSockeye eggs with onions and salt.
\nShe turns toward the checkout, breathes deep
\nthe familiar scent of fermented seal flipper,
\noctopus patties, cackling goose.
\n\u00a9 Wayne Lee<\/p>\n

\n

Grace Cavalieri \u2014 3rd place<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A Sonnet in 14 lines<\/h4>\n

1.When you enter, you\u2019d see the red velvet couch in the living room where My Uncle Joey, the alcoholic, soiled the velvet on New Year\u2019s Eve, on that particular moment, at midnight. I had to air it on the porch till they could take care of it. 2. Enroute the kitchen, after the dining room, you\u2019ll see Lenox swans gliding on the table. They held salt and pepper. I dusted the dining room weekly. The Lenox factory was in Trenton. We all had China. 3. The kitchen was floored in a parsimony of color, brown tiles, but the raging yellow walls made up for it. My father cooked scrambled eggs as my mother sometimes had illness. 4. The pantry held wrought iron chairs which were dragged out as needed if The Cunningham\u2019s brought extra people without asking. 5. The backyard was easily mowed with its deficit of green, only a patch surrounded by hedges, but I loved the Japonica tree and the peonies. It was like we were rich. Maybe we were. 6. The back porch was tempered with white paint and there were buckets of boiling starch you dipped shirts in. That\u2019s what we did in those days. Burned our hands. I helped and hung them on the line. Sometimes I ironed them for my father as he was a banker and had to look good. My mother had an open heart and did not feel well but we didn\u2019t know the reason then. I indulged her by ironing when she felt bad. 7. There was a cellar door out back which sloped, and we slid down it. They don\u2019t have them now but if you opened it there was a washing machine with a wringer and a coal stove with a heap of coal. No fear. Just a warm cellar where cats could have kittens. No stored canned vegetables or anything like that. This was not the country, for God\u2019s sake. This was Trenton. 8. I trusted the world then and the Roman Catholic Church although we lived in the Jewish section and did not find out we were Jewish till my father died. My uncle told us. But all my Jewish friends had \u201cfinished\u201d basements with bowls of fresh fruit and lightbulbs with flowers in them. I was happy to be suddenly Jewish. 9. Once Jane Rogers gave me a poem in the sixth grade that said \u201cmen f**ked their wives with butcher knives.\u201d I took it home and my mother called the principal. They changed my seat. I never trusted Jane Rogers again with poetry. 10. Once I was late for school because a girl who lived in an orphanage needed to go in the shoemakers on the way and I was scared to say no. The principal said \u201cno one can make you do anything you do not want to do\u201d as she made us stand in line to go back to class. 11. My cousin came to live with us as her mother died. I loved her so much and made her wake up at 2am to feed the dolls with me. She was 3 years younger and did everything I said. I loved her. When her father remarried, I thought I did something wrong to lose her. It was terrible. 12. We rode the bus everywhere we wanted for one dollar. 13. Once a man scared my cousin and me by showing us his private part. It was in a park. I grabbed her hand and ran until we met a man with a rake who went after him. 14. All in all, I had a life much like many others but for the dreams I had. Once I fainted in church from ecstasy, but my mother said it was because I hadn\u2019t eaten breakfast. \u00a9 Grace Cavalieri<\/p>\n

\n

Ojo Taiye \u2014 4th Place<\/strong><\/h3>\n

ODE TO THE RISING SUN<\/h4>\n

(Biafra War 1967-1970)<\/p>\n

until it no longer existed, the old country
\nwas eternal. & even after its dissolution,
\ninto the concept of secessionists, into stories
\nhanded down generations, of how once
\nthere was a land made entirely of salts\u2014
\na bridge that’s a mistranslation for what
\nthey did with our blood. I still call it a
\nhollow space where my body is dead &
\nalive. & thus, I know what survival does to
\na body that’s been primed for disappearance.
\nI taste the rust\u2014their bruised skins and hear
\nhow trauma sounds like traum, the German
\nword for dreams. I fish the waters for ruins
\n& come up with fever & the black square
\nof absence\u2014memories that do nothing but
\ncough pains\u2014the first scar my body exhales
\nwhenever the old stereo in the sitting room
\ndrips news. hide me in a city with no windows.
\ntoday, I dream my grandparents into the
\nmemory of their voice, as tillers of a thousand
\ncocoa trees. their shadows appearing between
\nthe gaps of dusk light amidst the branches
\nof my forked childhood. the night loops its
\nemptiness until my mouth is filled with the
\nweight of their splinters. their inheritance
\nclaims me as its own and I wake in the
\nbody of a ship. still there is wistfulness\u2014
\ncemeteries where our mothers wrote no
\nmemoir & our limbs remember dust. the lie\u2014
\nwhat was it there for, anyway?<\/p>\n

\u2014 after Aria Arber and John James<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Ojo Taiye<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CONGRATULATIONS TO the 2022 Poetry Contest Winners: SAMUEL SAMBA, WAYNE LEE, GRACE CAVALIERI AND OJO TAIYE!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[756,115,753,757,754,755],"class_list":["post-6430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-grace-cavalieri","tag-lummox-press","tag-lummox-press-2022-poetry-contest-winner","tag-ojo-taiye","tag-samuel-samba","tag-wayne-lee"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6430"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6432,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6430\/revisions\/6432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lummoxpress.com\/lc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}