2012
First Place: “My First Kiss,” Hannah Srajer, Oak Park and River Forest High School, Oak Park, IL.
Teacher: David Gilmer
Click here to watch "My First Kiss".
It is the smell I remember. The waxy oil
odor when opened, the pages yellow
& flat from years of turning, the stitches
lined like warped vertebrae. My grandmother
kept it in her left pocket & wore the scent
instead of perfume. Every Saturday it
was the same. The slow search for the golden
tube in her purse & then the quick flick of
her wrist pushing the lipstick up &
to her lips. She would take the prayer-
book from her left pocket & balance
the faded Hebrew in her hands,
cupped tightly as if it was made of
water, or dust, or nothing at all. On the
edges of her favorite pages there
were smudges of colors called paint the town
red & coral sunset & even pink #54 but it was not
the colors that mattered. It was the patterns
they left behind, the cracked fingerprints
of lips blooming out as she lowered to kiss
the page. One Saturday was different. I
was 8 or 9. I took the prayer
book from her hands & pressed my thin
unpainted lips to the outline of her on the page.
I wanted the color to leave the paper & join me,
I wanted to wear it outside the lines. I kept my lips
there for the entire Shalom Alcheim. I could feel
the page pressing back. My eyes were closed.
Second Place: “A Continuation of Jarman’s ‘Unholy Sonnet,’” Cindy Tay, The Harker School, Fremont, CA.
Teacher: Brigid Miller
Anointing me with oil: intent to kill
Wafts rust-like through my limbs, unstemmed, to wake
The drowsing bloodlust, ever green, and slake
The black thirst with this liberating pill.
Gulp rose water, and as I drink my fill,
The amen-sayers crash from pews and take
Last breaths, shattered glass shrieks; my ears don’t ache.
Before their blood goes cold, I fire at will
Until all that remain are slippery floors
And my own signature post-spree perfume,
Gunpowder essence, metal tang. Believe me,
now the pill burns in my gut with horror.
Within, a candle of contrition blooms
As I whisper too late—Father forgive.
Third Place: “Lynda,” Liane Yue, Carmel High School, Carmel, IN.
Teacher: Tony Willis
Lynda
Lynda got her hair cut over break
in some fancy salon downtown where her mother knows the proprietor
and they gossip over champagne.
Imagine that— a bird in a slick leather swivel chair.
And although we aren’t intimate
or even close
I grieve privately for the loss of
those peroxide red plumes
now blonde and cropped
no longer ruffled and matted.
But when Lynda collects her hair into a ponytail
her hands can’t secure all of the clipped feathers
and they cascade down stubbornly.
I catch a flash of familiar red,
a streak behind her ear
like a whispered secret,
that drugstore hair dye.