Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into themorning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, Mother Teresa. Burnt bagel,Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’sfailures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makeshim run a stop sign bang in front of a cop….
Seven, maybe eight years old, nude, and outOf nowhere there she wasStreaked from the waist down in glisteningPebbled green shit, shivering as she ate a tube of cherry lip GlossIn the Great Ape House at the Lincoln Park Zoo.My wife was the first to see her—Her hand flying to her mouth.A man in overalls, a…
I. “Who is Susan Glaspell?” That was the question The New York Times asked in half-inch type in May 1918. At the time, Susan Glaspell’s star was ascendant. Her name was already well known in the New York theater world for the one-act plays she had written for the Provincetown Players, the little theater she…
In my parents’ day, they called lovers flames,and I’d try to imagine this literally.I remember a girl asking if I wanted to make love,which I thought then meant sweet talk:You are breathtaking.My first loves were older; they took the top,their hair fell and swept my face.I felt their heat as if at any momentThey’d flood…
It’s the last dayof teachingin prison and timefor my promise:They could readme. Lay my lifeon that wobblingtable. Ignore fora momentthe torn coversof their rejectanthologies. Ignorefor a momentthe camera watching,the speaker tellingthem where theyneed to be:to Buddhist call-out,to meds, to cell.They’re grinning;I never giveanything away—not a pencilnot a secret.The first card flipsand Jeremiah saysLooks like you’ve…
She sank and died—the girlfrom out of town that summer.They pulled her bodylike waterweed, then winter came,enclosed the lake in glass, and sealedthe dark cavern of our questions.We skated on the frozen shell.All around, the mountains glitteredchained in ice. The lake was pale blueand cracked with stars—We lay on our backsacquiring a sense of the…
I was rolling jeans into tubular bundles and tucking them into my suitcase, packing for Prague. This trip would be the longest that I’d been away from the kids, and also the farthest. “Don’t worry about us,” my husband said. “OK,” I said. “We’ll be fine,” he continued, sensing my anxiety. He handed me an…
In nonfiction, our winner is Mimi Dixon for her essay “Breath.” The nonfiction judge, Dinty W. Moore, writes that “Breath” is “an exquisite memoir essay filled with gorgeous detail, breath, music, wisdom, and surprise. Though I never met the author’s father, by the end of this graceful, intimate essay I, too, miss his presence in…
In poetry, our winner is Leila Chatti for her poem “Confession.” The poetry judge, Marianne Boruch, writes of “Confession,” “It’s the first I’ve heard of anyone having an honest-to-god point-of-view about Mary whom many of us grew up numbly staring at on a holy card, buying her pious gratitude whole-cloth, and mouthing each repeated prayer…
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