at the baggage claim in JFK (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: POETRY)
One of our two poetry winners is Lo Naylor, for their poem “at the baggage claim in JFK.” This year’s poetry judge was Joshua Bennett. Of Naylor’s poem, he writes:
“at the baggage claim in JFK” is a poem that transported me back to a city I’ve loved for as long as I’ve been alive, and in a way that was entirely unexpected. It unfolds almost concentrically. We begin with a man holding a sign in an airport bearing a single word, and end up at the beating heart of a timeless human drama, returning to the fundamental question of who made and shaped us, of what we are and why we are here. This is a poet seemingly unashamed, unafraid, of what adoration offers: its splendor, its power, its costs. This is a poem that is overflowing, in equal measure, with tenderness and wisdom. Image after image, it invites us to a world that is both our own and entirely new.
Ploughshares Editorial Associate Matt Albren wrote the following questions for Naylor about their poem and process.
Matt Albren: What about the airport as a place—specifically baggage claim—convinced you to set the poem there? Did it always feel like the natural setting of the poem, or did you grapple with other places as well?
Lo Naylor: Lost luggage, exhaustion, anticipation—a baggage claim is a space we want to move through as quickly as possible. Get the bag, get out. And yet, what happens if we linger and look around? If we inhabit lyric time there? What kind of experience can this transformed stage offer up? These questions propelled me as I worked to discover the poem after the initial act of witnessing.
MA: Who would you say, if anyone, this piece is written for?
LN: When I came to the page, I was writing toward my mentor, Catherine Barnett, who helped shape my poetics. But in terms of who the poem is now for, I’d say my younger sister. Her death by suicide is what initially pivoted me away from film and toward poetry as a medium for meaning-making, a shift that has reshaped how I move through the world.
MA: Did this poem feel aligned with your usual process/style, or did it deviate in any way(s)?
LN: This is one of the more outward facing poems from a manuscript that reckons with a sister’s suicide, a Mormon upbringing, and the way grief distorts memory and time, tangling them into knots. I found it invigorating—and ultimately essential to the manuscript as a whole—when unexpected encounters opened portals into a kind of wonder. I was grateful each time one appeared, and I find these openings vital to my poetics. I’m also interested in how portals open on the level of the line, where language—or its breakdown—can create sonic or syntactic correlatives.
MA: How does this poem’s selection as winner of the 2025 Emerging Writers’ Contest propel you forward? What do you anticipate working on and/or grappling with next?
LN: I wrote my manuscript without submitting individual poems for publication—it was between me and the chorus of voices that kept me company in books I was reading and rereading. It’s an incredible honor to have been selected, especially so soon after leaving my writing cave. I almost fell on the floor when I received the news and read Joshua Bennett’s generous comments about the poem—it was the first time I’d heard myself called a poet in the third person!
As for what’s next, I’ve just begun sending out my manuscript. The state of the world is deeply unsettling, but I’m finding solace by turning toward poetry as a place of attention, connection, and resistance to the degradation of what is human.
*
a man in a black newsboy cap holds a sign with one word:
mother. other men hold signs but I see mother
& cannot look away. it’s late,
faces are clenched & the carousels buzz
nervously as if they too are awaiting her. I’m not
holding a sign, but I glance around to see if
my mother might appear anyway, around the corner,
draped in totes & purses, wheeling her suitcase
with a fraying green ribbon tied to the handle.
my child is strapped to me, sleeping, & I imagine
my mother, a cushion the shape of a croissant
around her neck, lighting upon the man’s sign
as if it were the face of her daughter, the one she lost,
returned to her. a sign. a siren. mother.
someone asks & I overhear the man say
he hasn’t seen his mother in twenty-three years.
he would have been a small child, now he’s tall,
bearded, & he runs to her, a small woman
with long braided hair. for a moment
we are all suspended—the whole airport:
the passengers, the conveyor belts, the escalators
going neither up nor down. then a sheen reappears
on the floors as the man drops to his knees,
wraps his arms around his mother’s waist,
draws himself into the child
who might have hidden behind her legs.
it doesn’t last, of course. the baby makes her noises
& time clicks back into place, ferries us all away.
