Poems • 1st- through 3rd-Place Contest Winners

Award Winning Poetry

from our 2021 Poetry Contest

2021

The Father

Your dead father dogs you like the white mutt that roams

along the fishing holes and walks the edge of gravel roads, sometimes at a trot, most times slow, but with purpose, muscle and sinew protecting old bones. The father in silence with pipe clenched between his teeth made a fog of every place he inhabited. What did he understand of you, late arrived child, when he hoped the burdens of fatherhood were done?

The white dog looks deep within you, his eyes the blue of your father’s favorite Rapala. You take his poles, his tackle box pulled shut with an old belt and sit at the shore. You cast

and try to think past what you harbor in you—the strange alchemy of love and duty, and the anger that rises from it, thick as the dog’s hackles when it senses something hidden in the lake’s fog.

Jennifer Fandel

Proper Burial

When we turn the earth in our yard for garden, the last tenant’s burials

emerge as bones. Let us say some words for every creature that breathed its last, for the rabbits, birds, and squirrels, for the dog and the stray cat that came for mice and rest, when the dog was gone and the baby possum that once stewed in the scent of dirt and sleep, the insects cometh, and the moles that shrugged off the little life left in them, removed from their steely traps. My grandmother refused to be buried in the Catholic cemetery because of a gopher problem and laid her money down for a municipal plot. Digging up bones picked clean, I understand. Last spring, arctic air swept the plains and a foot of snow fell after the robins had arrived, the worms shrinking below the refrozen soil. My husband found a robin lying in the snow and thought he felt the heart still beating, the bird’s dark eye frozen open. He carried the robin inside, lay its body in a shoebox under a scrap of wool, as if a bed tucked into.

Jennifer Fandel

Jennifer Fandel’s poetry is forthcoming or has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Ginger, Measure, The Baltimore Review, and RHINO, as well as a number of anthologies including, Hope Is the Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic. Her other published work includes book reviews and nonfiction books for children and young adults. She teaches poetry at Oakhill Correctional Institution through the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project and tutors students in writing at Oakhill through the Odyssey Beyond Bars college program.

2021

Saint Simone

She starved herself thinking about grace. How difficult it was

to be nothing but flesh: prickly, contrarious, pretending to get by on cigarettes and headaches. As a student, she witnessed the heedless velocity of factories; of campaigns preparing to turn people into things. She called this force. Like any woman who has loved a man, she understood

God’s absence— the harrowing way loss can intensify passion. Denying herself the comforts of church or sect, she believed only in challenge: staring into the black waves of oblivion

until they shimmered.

David Southward

Notes Toward a Queer Physics

quantum bits: the either/and/or particles of being instantly transmitted

across space— attraction’s valences

revealed only when observed

LGBTQIA+ encryptions too deep to hack: the anywhere between M and F, the Mother Father

God please quit asking what I am other than estranged and stranded, your splintered lover eternally seeking/avoiding entanglement

David Southward

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His publications include Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books, 2020) and Apocrypha, a sonnet sequence based on the Gospels (Wipf & Stock, 2018). Southward is a two-time winner of the Lorine Niedecker Prize and was selected by Mark Doty for the Muse Prize from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2019 his poem “Mary’s Visit” received the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. Southward resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff.

2021

Let My Hands Too Bring the Day

The red edge of morning, like a razor, slits the dark. No more excuses. Today I will be sharpened. I will be more myself as I would be. No espaliered intent—centered, leaning into each moment the way a ladder leans toward the window of a burning house; I claim the ascent, push ahead. I’m the water in the hose, I am mercy, the chase of flame, but also red heat eating oxygen and growing stronger. I write my life high as smoke repeating its open roll. I write my name, cite all my yesterdays, old bones and battle scars. Let my open heart meet injustice with equal force, let kindness rattle, shake me in life’s cup and pour me out as urban produce, Ai Weiwei’s blankets, leadfree water, room for refugees, Head Start, health care. For the homeless—a meal, a bed, lasting warmth. For everyone: sidewalk art.

Paula Schulz

Paula Schulz has taught grades pre-K through college. She has been involved in many ekphrastic projects and lives and writes in Slinger with her husband, Greg.

Elegy for Home

Beginning phrase from “Digging” by Seamus Heaney

To the age of hands and animals laying open the fields, is as far back as I know my family. From a language that is my heritage, from a language I cannot read is the marriage record in our family Heilige Schrift. When I hold it in my hands I hold generations of ancestors. Once their fingerprints pressed whorls of a topographic map into these pages. Contour lines of my life shaping me in ways I don’t understand. If I could see those lines now, would they show me the rise and fall of family acreage, the depth of home-stead rivers, the depth of a farmer’s strength? Would I like these people, hold hands with them like kindergarteners crossing a street? II

Let there be gemütlichkeit, beer and sausages. Let there be music to polka me home, because that is where I am going. Out one barn door and into previous generations’ tillable land and horse collars. Field boots straight from van Gogh’s brush, strange music of the umlaut filling steamer trunks. Where were you all your lives and did you ever imagine me, ever think that your Bible-page history would reach into a world like this one with GPS-guided tractors? III

Always, always at the margins—sorrow for a way of life gone, for people I will never know, for the everyday absence in me. But also for the land holding a history of those who came before us, whose arrowheads worked their way from earth like bones. All these families and none, none of us living from these loved fields anymore.

Paula Schulz

JUDGE’S NOTES

UWM Ph o t o / P e te Amland

BRENDA CÁRDENAS

The Father

“The Father” is exceptional in its marriage of content and form. I admire how the author threads the figure of the dog through the entire poem, turning it into an extended metaphor for the deceased (and once-reticent) father’s foremost presence in the speaker’s mind, which is “dogged” by complicated feelings. Couplets mirror the dog and speaker, father and child, and the merging of dog and father. I also appreciate the vivid imagery throughout, especially the haunting image at the poem’s end. Such captivating similes and images, precise diction, and enjambment kept me eagerly plunging into each new line as I journeyed through the poem.

Saint Simone

I admire poems that teach me something or that encourage me to learn. In “Saint Simone,” the economy of language and smart lineation are also admirable: the way, for example, that the line break after “nothing” invites ambiguity, or the way the line break after “God’s absence” underscores that lack. I am also especially struck by the poem’s last three stanzas—the power in the image of Saint Simone. It’s an ending that shimmers, that reverberates in the reader’s mind.

Let My Hands Too Bring the Day

The forcefulness of this poem’s opening image immediately pulled me in, and I quickly embraced the speaker’s fervor to live fully, mercifully, and ethically. This feeling was intensified by the central metaphor of fire and the poem’s accumulating energy. In its final capacious breath, the speaker becomes a cornucopia of precious gifts for those who need them most—and for all of us.