2020 Winning Poems

2020 Winning Poems

Dead Light Switch by Nathan Yockey. You peer out at me broken and useless, naked and ugly. Void of life once lightning coursed through your copper veins. No more. We stare face to face. I don't see you. You are just part of our rought-cut trailer walls. You embody our hand-me-down house Cracking and old, stricken with mold. You are the house. You, are all we can get. You don't matter. You don't matter. Because our light doesn't come from some switch. Because we dont get our light from some switch because we get our light from each other.
Bodies by Jiro Emilio Jones. We are sculpted with the Earth. Our legs are like trees, made of red muscle and bone. We are rivers and rapids of blood flow like nectar from the fruit of the vine. We are organic machinery. Our hands are claws made of pumping pink mush. Small shields of keratin decorate the tips. Little threads srout on us in collagen gardens, which we tend to like farmers in passing seasons. Incredible is the tongue that tastes, sensing each feature each flavor. Mountains and ridges are in our mouths. We have valleys and cliffs in each inch. Our pulses sing like birds. Like wind, we pull the air. Watch us thrive.
Aboard the Hawaiian Airlines by Nikelle Price. If a road traversed the Pacific Ocean that is how I would voyage to the land where salty waves lick the beach with their frothing tongues. A plane operates as a catalysts for my anxieties. I sit in the aisle seat of row twenty-something when a sneeze erupts behind me I can almost detect the prickly parasistes as they hunt for a new host to pester. I need hand sanitizer to kill 100% of germs. My jaw clenches as the stewardesses drone their monotonous monologue; no matter how many times I've listened, I retain nothing. Flotation device? These pancake seat are scarcely sufficient for anyone's butt! I need a Coast Guard-approved life raft. My scriptures flutter on my knees as I constrict my mother's hand. The stewardess with a thick Southern accent praises me for reading them. Tears splatter onto the pages as we surge through the tarmac. I need a highway to Hawaii.