2023 FALL ADULT CONTEST RESULTS
POETS CHOICE, JUDGE DAN BEACHY-QUICK
1st Place: Crystal Willer, “The Arsonist Speaks of Her Beginnings”
2nd Place: David J.S. Pickering, “Zsa-Zsa Eva Magda, Pray for Us in Our Time of Need”
3rd Place: Sarah Rohrs, “A Woman Alone”
1st HM: Paul Telles, “Ham Salad”
2nd HM: Ted Virts, “Sonora”
3rd HM: Jone Rush MacCulloch, “Walking Toward the Stars”
Judge Comments:
“The Arsonist Speaks of Her Beginnings”
A poem of lovely lyric meditation, invoking memory into palpable image, opening in the reader a nostalgia far from saccharine in nature, but the old wound of home that, even in its pain, is a refuge.
“Zsa-Zsa Eva Magda, Pray for Us in our Time of Need”
Charged with language of insouciant prayer, “Zsa-Zsa Magda” achieves the rare feat of being both iconoclastic and reverent, claiming those opposites as one, all while revealing the strange, mythic hold celebrity’s grandeur has upon us. (Advice: cut the “Amen” that ends the poem—which might be a touch too much.)
“A Woman Alone”
Image here creates a world of profound depth and nuance, subtle enough to bring comfort to the singular loneliness that marks the poem. From the “startled crow in morning” to the bowl, vase, and “petals falling,” every line here bears remarkable precision and genuine empathy.
“Ham Salad”
A narrative poem filled with maternal love and child’s wonder, impeccably setting a scene that keeps vividly alive the distant past, and creates a lyric lushness amid the story’s flow.
“Sonora”
A poem of tracking, of tracing, immersing in a moving ways within the ethical dilemma of the border. A human care, and a human keening, feel the lovely experiment of “Sonora.”
“Walking Toward the Stars” accomplishes what few sestinas can manage to do—to use the forms strict requirements to unfold the magic of matriarchal memory, the makes of the world a wonder-place, and transports the reader there.
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The Arsonist Speaks of Her Beginnings, 1st Place, Crystal Willer
Before, there was no field beyond here.
The copper jar didn’t fall so much as curl away.
The kitchen remained fixed. The blue of the counter
and the blue of the smoke was the same mud gray.
The china that cracked and popped would have broken
in the hollowed sink, the sink itself a kind of china.
___
Before, on the dresser in the bedroom,
a line of glass jars: each air and a spider.
Each spider was large, unmistakable,
the numbers made them all the more present.
Every night and every morning, a choir
waiting, my mother the conductor.
___
Even before the fire, the house looked gutted.
The thing of value, the piano, didn’t fit,
calling out for so much care, effort.
Shelves were already matches, kindling blankets.
I came back to my home a pilgrim, wanting,
until I was all emptied valley, shallowed basin.
Crystal Willer’s poems have appeared in the Spoon River Poetry Review, Territory, West Branch Wired, The Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter, and works as an archivist at Lewis & Clark College.
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Zsa-Zsa Eva Magda, Pray for Us in Our Time of Need, 2nd Place, David J.S. Pickering
O Sisters of Perpetual Dahling, you made black-
and-white TV seem exotic with your exaggerated
accents and marabou-feathered tulle, your talent
only for working talk show panels and cocktail
parties full of rich men, your European glamour
hawking products and opening shopping malls.
But ribbon-cutting events are gone. No one needs
celebs-in-person, in Chanel, in full hair-and-makeup.
Phone and filter and flick of finger do it all. Beauty
is ubiquitous, especially on the Insta—that incessant
pictograph blur eating our inner gospel, hunkering us
in AppleAndroid foxholes as we chant susurrant
Kaddishes for our social media ascendancies. Pray
for us, Zsa Zsa Queen of Outer Space, Eva of Green
Acres, Magda of, well, not so much, but still Famous
for Being Famous. We’re lost without your mink-
framed decolletage. Seraphim of the Much Married,
find us in the echoes of our clicks. Your lost kids
cannot be saved by TikTok, so chant to us a laud
in musical Hungarian that brings us to each other,
brings us to our breath, to a resplendence. Build
in us the faith to slay our killer likes and memes.
Make us exquisite and deep, so we might know
ourselves. Our kind. Our custom fit to the Earth.
Amen
David J.S. Pickering is a native Oregonian, having grown up and lived much of his life in the working-class culture of the North Oregon Coast. His first collection, Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland, received the 2020 Airlie Prize. His poetry is published (or forthcoming) in a variety of journals including Tar River Poetry, Mantis, Fireweed, Lips, Reed Magazine, Raven Chronicles, and Gertrude Journal. David lives with his husband in Hillsboro, Oregon.
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A Woman Alone, 3rd Place, Sarah Rohrs
A startled crow in morning.
Black caw in blue sky.
Gold light on cleaved peaches
fills my palms with presence.
Bread and dimpled apples.
Wheat fields rippling with scythes.
Memory drawn of dancing
slaps water on my face.
The wafer melting on my tongue
is a lie I won’t tell with iron lips.
I warm my hands in the shuffling
and kiss a mouth that doesn’t call back.
The light carves triangles on my bed.
I rise from the crimped covers,
hold the space in front with two hands
and push against red stained glass windows.
No one shelters me in cradled arms
from the sounds of hymnal pages turning,
a music that stirs and stirs
when my legs brush together in my skirt.
The table drips with wax and incense,
but has no bread, no snaking apple worms,
no potions for mixing words.
Just a bowl, and a vase. Petals falling.
Sarah Rohrs is a long-time poet, photographer and former newspaper reporter living in Salem. She currently works in a local elementary school, and has taught haiku to third-graders. She’s been part of group poetry readings, and been published in small poetry journals over the years. For the last decade she’s been part of an online Poem-A-Day group which she’s helped moderate.
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Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His most recent books include The Thinking Root: The Poetry of Ancient Greek Philosophy (Milkweed, 2023) and Arrows (Tupelo Press, 2020). Long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, his work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations, and by the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.