Thinking of submitting to our Blue Lights Book Prize this year? Hunting for inspiration or wondering what we’re looking for? Check out three poems by our 2017 Poetry winner, Jennifer Givhan. Givhan’s book Girl With Death Mask can be purchased here.
Submissions for the 2018 Blue Lights Book Prize in Poetry are open until Oct. 31.
Mexican Wedding Cookies
We could road trip to Tennessee from New Mexico
the kids & I we could be brave they think I’m brave
we could unroll our bags & throw our chanclas in the grass
we could barefoot it we could unlearn the constellations
& learn them again unhitch their stories from their names
like the names I’ve taken into my belly & rolled dough
like masa to my mouth through my cervix I’ve
unbound them I’ve squatted toward
cement toward asphalt & thick summer air
squelching in my lungs not enough for the work not enough
we could love something ridiculous we could mix pecans
& flour & sugar into balls in our hands then scoop them
onto sheets in the oven sprinkle them in powder
white as that dress I swore I needed we could unbind ourselves
from kitchens from messes from our mama’s ideas of what
we need for happiness for luck for sweetness on our tongues
we could do it I’ve heard a recipe for letting go tastes
eerily similar to holding on the difference in the butter
or the temperature or the salt in the batter but we know
I’m lying all the things we could & why Tennessee—
What’s Been Given Me Secondhand
He bought me a cherry-red dress no a black dress
with cherries stemmed & shining as if bubbling atop
grenadine & syrup with the insurance money he got
for his mama’s dying I’d run out of clothes in that
beachfront apartment where his drug friends were letting
us crash we slept in a cupboard the length of his 6’4
rope-coiled body folded like a robot into a box
a cardboard home for what almost became of me
for loving him too long for loving him at all
Why I always remember him in thrift shops busted
lamps & scraggly rugs piled against walls knockoffs
paraphernalia of longer legs longer days & how often
I miss that messed up man He bought a wedding
band He lost it in the ocean I never asked him
for anything but a razor I hadn’t shaved in weeks
a bottle of shampoo I’d never tasted oysters & he said
let them slide down your throat the ones we found
in Styrofoam outside the pier eatery but
he wouldn’t let me near tinfoil again that white dust made
him so mad coming down & every time I bled he
understood what I was missing The motherless
recognize the childless He said we’d buried something
in the sand Not a castle or a shovel or a bundle of cells
that wouldn’t stick that wouldn’t grow nothing
so routine Once in a while in a Goodwill between faux
fur & broken music boxes I find him hiding I’m
high enough to believe it his windup his living again
Refugio State
Searing into beach as if demented a woman stakes a tent
Does anyone feed the birds does anyone sleep on dirt
A body can survive beneath a pier sea life attaching itself
to the underbelly I am pillared by bilge water a host
of barely visible creatures I’ve forgotten how to swim
Campsite swabbed of ashes trash a marbled tin pot
of coffee my mother would let me sip grounds A woman
not her no longer anyone I know unrolls a bag
for lying in like a crab atop the sand Did I really fall
asleep here once fat with my daughtered belly
& scorching It’s been a long time It’s been too long
I’ve misunderstood I’ve lost something Geiger me
No one could survive this scabby plankton this unkempt
I slept an ocean of ache & woke & fed the birds that settled
