Poem in Your Pocket Day is highly anticipated day at JMRL, and this year the Library was excited to add a new program to the annual events: the JMRL/WriterHouse Adult Poetry Contest. With over 90 entries in the first year of the contest, it’s easy to see that there are a lot of poets in our area.
While there were many delightful entries, judge Ron Smith, Poet Laureate of Virginia, selected Kara West as this year’s winner for her poem “July 29, 1970, Anchorage,” and Amelia Williams as runner-up for “In the Field of the Ruined Piano.”
Both contestants, among many other incredible poets, shared their poems at JMRL’s annual Poetry on the Steps, an open mic night held on the steps of the Central Library where a crowd of verse-lovers gathered to listen to and read poetry aloud.
For the moment you’ve all been waiting for, here are this year’s winning entries for the Adult Poetry Contest:
July 29, 1970Anchorageby Kara West–My mother says minutesafter I was born, while the doctor was stitchingbetween her legs, he and my father talked–of salmon fishing. How in Alaska,there’s nothing better. How, if you find a sweet spot,you can stand and hook them all day. You can–cook one while catching anotherand eat it when you need a break.And how plump and pink and tender.–At four in the morning, my mother was too tired to raisea fuss, much less her voice. She lay and dozedto the soft, slightly sticky sound of white nurses’ shoes,–which she mistook in her dreams for the suckingof her new babe already at its source,plump and pink and tender.–When I did come to her, I was not pink,but yellow. Jaundiced and not plump,but stringy, long, with two mottled, blinking black spots.–“She’s a bananafish,” my mother cried, bursting into tears.My father whispered promises of beautifulsalmon fishing trips he would never take me oninto my new ears.
In the Field of the Ruined Pianoby Amelia Williams–“It’s me or that piano.” Their covered wagon groans to a haltin a lush Appalachian meadow beside the buffalo tracethat widens up to the Cumberland Gap. Callous & loud,–no tenderness for what she loves: her rosewood Chickering Grand–all that’s left since typhoid took her family; she wed in fearof spinsterhood & hunger, wears regret like a muslin duster.–His gray wolfhound cowers whenever he speaks. “Unload it,”she says, voice shaky, but brow determined, my foremotherHenrietta Schwab Funk, adding in imperious German,–“Now you may leave. I am staying to await the next wagon.”Her ochre-tinged cameo, in my red lacquer jewelry boxcame with the gift of her story: she played for no one, only–meadow rue & crown vetch, a mournful Nocturne, whose openingnotes fluttered like a mourning dove. All day long, German dances;that night she sheltered under the piano in her boiled wool cloak.–Sought a stream at dawn’s light, found berries, chewed red clover, playeduntil her fingers cramped & she grew afraid. Day five, listless, she layin the Chickering’s shadow, aching with hunger, almost resigned.–Near dusk, the squeak of wheels. Tomas Guillaume, Acadianfur trader, in an un-sprung cart, heading for La Louisiane.Language no use to them, but his voice was kind, his tone amused.–No room for a piano. His gestures said he’d buy her onesome day. They shared bread & jerky, were wed with smiles & glances;en route to the delta they traded words like pearls: faucon, falke.–A great love she bore him, the story goes, celebratedespecially in the field of the ruined piano; they’d returnin spring after selling the pelts. Soundboard cracked, keys warped,–music stranger each year, an off-kilter cascade echoingTom’s bayou fiddle & stomp, Henrietta’s labor cries,the squeezebox of a girl whose great niece gave me the cameo.