Contest Winners: Marie Hartung, Judith Sornberger and Cheryl Johnson.

I am pleased to post the three winning poems in our last Writing It Real writing contest. You remember the challenge—to include the number 12 in some way in the poem. Our guest judge Jeannine Hall Gailey chose the winners, each of whom is entitled to a tuition waiver for one Writing It Real class with me. I look forward to working with each of the winners. Although she may not have found the poems entirely finished, they were nearly all there in her estimation. I have included her comments at the end of each poem.

First Place Winner

What the Tulalip’s Might Want You To Know After the Shooting
by Marie Hartung

In memory of four teenagers shot and killed by their friend
at Marysville High School, WA, in 2014.
The Tulalip Tribe comprises about ½ the town.

After the shooting, the interstate was said to be “a curtain, definitely a curtain,” said the senator and the tribal leader, about how the road had been viewed for years, a division of nations now recoiled, the road now a snake.

Earth turned fiery, not with light, but with intervals of darkness. In living rooms, what was imagined was a clap of thunder, a single sound that changes us, like the cut of autumn wind. Wind is always a backdraft of breath.

Bark to smoke, smoke to ash, the bones of the dead became the dust we inhaled. Everything alive is born from bone. A child impervious to love filled all his holes with grit, then spilled it in one motion like rust from a faraway sky.

A one-man canoe is swift and can score air for distances, but cannot hold the weight of what has capsized. Land spreads seeds on the wind but no one notice the hush was deafening as it whistled birdsong to dogs.

A quick rain soaked cattail mats hung on walls for insulation, put on floors for seating, hung as partitions, open down the middle for walking but steps between are empty. A passed hand tethered a long arc.

A jealous boy became the storm of a current, the sweep of a flood, as water around us rose. In one moment, he sang a plume-shape song like a howl; the whole world gasped as the salmon flooded upstream to our mouth, into our last red breath.

****

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s comment: The language in this poem is really specific, vivid, and memorable. The subject matter packs an emotional punch, but the poem itself is restrained in its grief. I also liked the form, the small paragraph/stanza prose pieces — those seemed to me to be trying to contain the powerful feelings evoked by the subject matter.

Second Place Winner

Invitation to Time in Twelve Movements
by Judith Sornberger

1

Come time, be our medium, our raw
sienna and burnt umber,
our desert sunrise and sunflower.

2

Be our clay, the turning
of our wheel, the searing gift
of each pot’s gestation.

3

Be the space within
each bowl and vase—
daylilies and our hands
as we arrange them.

4

Be our ink
and also the scroll
on which our words
meander toward meaning.

5

Be our indigo-dyed threads
do-si-do-ing patterns
through the white ones.
Be the loom that allows
their marriage.

6

Be the seam stitching
through the fabric,
the high hum of the Singer
and its pauses.

7

Be the garment we create
and its outgrowing.

8

Be the song
we’re always improvising—
the jazz, the scat, the doodly-op-op-do-wah
of conversation.

9

Be the staff
on which notes
find their rhythm.

10

Be the line we hang our wishes on to dry.
Freshen them in breezes drenched with lilac.

11

Simmer each day’s sauce
until it’s spicy on the tongue.

12

Dance with us,
most intimate of partners—
closer than the heart
our breath keeps time with.
Let us think we’re leading.
Let us believe
you’ll never
leave.

****

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s comment: I liked the way this poem started small and expanded outwards, a nice combination of idea and imagery. I might have liked a teensy bit more specificity in some of the imagery, but I thought it was a good sustained effort with admirable musicality.

Third Place Winner

Twelve O’Clock
by Cheryl Johnson

I never knew why Grandma and Grandpa
slept at opposite ends of the house.

Lace curtains filmed her windows.
Grandpa’s windows were bare.

The moon shone bright in his room; coyotes howled.
Too tired to sleep, Grandma stared at her wall’s lace pattern.

Both told stories to this child who hung on every word,
Salish and Dane spilling into midnight.

I leaned in, just like the house,
listening to strange syllables, bouncing off the walls.

A rescue from my mother’s marriage gone bad,
I remembered the windows of our old neighborhood,

often shattered, and how dogs howled there,
on the bare dirt lawns.

The divorce that wasn’t all that hard to bear
since it landed me on the Sanpoil and space to roam,

with windows to peer out of at night while praying
my dog survived the night.

Why do we fear the night, Grandpa?
Story a truth for me, its meaning garbed in symbol,

a window flung open so I could withstand
the howling until it stopped

and the house caved in, each room
silent, not a sound blowing out

my grandparents gone, and a ceaseless grief,
those words long walled in this abandoned house.

****

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s comment: It’s difficult to write a poem about grandparents without sinking into sentimentality, and I think this poem did a good job with that. I did find myself wanting more from the narrative — what are some exact details about both grandparents? What exact stories did they tell the child? — but a great start to an interesting poem about marriage as observed by an outsider.

***

In late summer, I’ll announce another Writing It Real writing contest, this time for both poets and prose writers. We won’t have a specific theme or prompt this time. You’ll be asked to enter a piece you’ve been wanting help with in the hopes that my responses to your work-in-progress will help revise and strengthen your writing into a winner for our guest judge.