WINNERS OF SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER’S 2nd ANNUAL HIGH SCHOOL POETRY CONTEST
April is National Poetry Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, Earth Month, and National Library Week (April 13-19). “Far from being the cruelest month,” Al Young says, “April is the coolest.”
Alex Banuelos: Grand Prize Winner
DEITY
Deity comes home late
the lovely, tired little drunk
hair let loose and curling at the ends.
In the darkness of the living room,
and in her stocking feet,
she tiptoes to the couch
with exaggerated sneaking—
knees lifting almost to her chest
and arms outstretched like airplane wings—
to pass out limp and dreaming in her dress.
She does not see me in the doorway
a shadow leaning heavy on the frame,
the hollows of my eyes gone blue
a dozen years ago.
My vanity and my good looks
had the decency to leave together.
There is some mercy, after all, in our design:
a soft amnesia to the frequently mistreated, an adrenaline flare to the cornered and outnumbered, a flash of white light to the very nearly dead.
If I could sweep together all my scraps of time:
the leap years in my arms
and the hours lost in airplanes
flying east against the turning world,
I’d stitch them front to end
and weave a garland
like water lily crown,
lay it wet and heavy
on Deity’s spinning head of sun bleached hair.
Her even sleeping sounds
bounce lightly off the walls and floor
compounding ad infinitum
in the echo chamber of our home.
She is indifferent company,
member of the privileged caste
exempt from housework,
boredom,
and the sticky paper of intimate associations.
Still, I can’t resist the waif
flushed pink, and posed
exactly as she fell.
She is time-sick,
drunk and lovely.
I am just an incidental:
the kindly aging organism
that puts her down to bed
Alexander Banuelos
Naomi Neal: Runner-Up
(School of the Arts High School, San Francisco)
Photo: Sasha A. Vu
VOYAGE
A boat found me,
followed me home like a hungry dog
followed me far from home, like memory
and I found my sea legs,
and they were stronger than my
land legs.
The boat was
busted fenders
and t-shirts
and forgiveness
and sleep,
it kissed the water sideways like cinema
and swam.
And it was me and the boat and my sea legs
and my white sky and my ocean, clean.
In the North we passed an island
where the last bears lived
in houses of honeycomb bricks.
In the South
a boy with a cowlick swam out from shore
to bring me a Coke.
In the East I bought knick-knacks,
In the West I was scorned.
We shored up in the center of the compass
where the arrow ate itself, feet first
on a rock painted in a bird shit palette,
my boat and I.
It grinned goodbye with bear teeth
and dissolved into the sea, litter and
cotton balls spotted with blood.
My sea legs and I strolled snowy beaches
and ruined woodlands
and corporate deserts
each other’s and our own.
Naomi Neal
Finalists in Sacramento Poetry Center’s 2nd annual high school competition gather at “The Stage” (April 2008)
Photo: Rebecca Morrison
SPC’s 2008 High School Poetry Contest finale was held on April 14th at “The Stage“ in midtown Sacramento. Local poet and CSUS professor Brad Buchanan had selected 17 finalists from all over Northern California, and the finalists read their poems to an enthusiastic full house. Then the final judge, SPC President Bob Stanley, presented the grand prize winner, Alex Banuelos, and the runner-up winner, Naomi Neal, with cash awards from the Poetry Center. There were nearly twice as many entries as the 2007 contest – over 500 altogether – and the quality of the work was superb.
— Bob Stanley, Director
Sacramento Poetry Center
Photo: Rebecca Morrison
State laureate Al Young, Sacramento’s laureate Julia Connor, and Bob Stanley, Director of the Sacramento Poetry Center, April 2008.
