Chaffin/Kash Poetry Prize – Kentucky State Poetry Society
1st Place: Lucie Brooks “Inheritance”
“Inheritance,” struck me immediately for its daring, intelligence, poignancy, and the skillful way it incrementally unveils the emotional and historical truths via the speaker all the way to it’s very last words. It is a dark and painful, but important poem that deserves a wide audience.
– Frank X. Walker
Inheritance
By Lucie Brooks
Here
is a math
problem. If
approximately
six thousand five
hundred Black people
were lynched then how
many white people attended
a lynching? Factors to consider:
how many spread picnic blankets,
how many carved mementos from flesh.
Solve for Y. Advertisements for the events
ran in the papers. Others came quick, storms
sweeping in. Maybe ten thousand answered the
ad while twenty waited at the jail. Split the difference.
Accept the necessity of guessing: one hundred white men
women and children average per lynching. Now you have six
hundred and fifty thousand white great grandparents. Go online.
Look up generational equations, plug in population data. Stare at the
number and try to fathom how to excise a hidden wound. Fifty-six million
two hundred and twenty-five thousand descendants of the people who could
smile at a lynching. Maybe it was one of my grandparents swaddled tight, rocked
quiet in the crowd. Maybe we have passed down more than Grandma’s autumn leaf
Jewel pottery: an inherited second tongue beneath the first, bloody from all it muscles
down behind the smile, red drops twining ‘round leaves until trees turn crimson, fruit rots.
2nd Place: Allison Thorpe “The Women of Appalachia”
“The Women of Appalachia” moved like a creek and proved to be a sonic masterpiece from the “sing like the hills on fire.” The poem’s capacity to both lift up and carry an authentic Appalachian cultural motif fully invested in the land and the people all the way through with fresh and original images was impressive. What a beautiful poem.
– Frank X. Walker
The Women of Appalachia
By Allison Thorpe
Sing like hills on fire
The incandescent torch and singe-smoldered notes
Of maple, sumac, persimmon, sassafras
They sing the rush and ripple
That crisp-cold rides every creek
The strum of water over boulder
They sing the gospel of bluebells
Returning to the dew-dusty fields
Faith of moss and earthworm
They sing rhythms ribbed
Of washboard and limestone-callused fingertips
Linens bleaching the landscape
They sing like garden wind chimes
Deep-gonged harmony of beans and squash
Breeze-jangled gossip among the tomatoes
They sing the protest of mountain tops
Fallen to metal claws ripping and ripping
The earth’s dazzled dress
They sing an anthem for the soot-haloed bodies
Men married to the dark seams of coal
Their sun-craved prayers
They sing the slogged trudge
Of the captured, the kidnapped, the seekers
Ancestors laboring the jagged mountains
They sing their hands and hearts
The inky pages, vine-twisted baskets, rainbow quiltings
They sing until blood becomes bone
3rd Place: Amy Richardson “Scary Movies from Mini-Mart”
I found “Scary Movies from Mini-Mart” quite striking because of its ability to authentically conjure up youthful innocence while recalling a traumatic experience. The easy way it moves down the page towards its revelatory exit after being complicated by the juxtaposition of the reality of horror vs fictional horror is really quite stunning.
– Frank X. Walker
Scary Movies from the Mini-Mart
By Amy Richardson
When my mamaw was
in hospice care,
I stayed at her house
with my mom.
I was fifteen and
slept on the couch
in her living room
covered with quilts
she had pieced by hand,
often staying up
most of the night
watching horror movies
I rented at the gas station
on the end of the street
back when you still had
to borrow VHS tapes
to see anything new.
I remember so many
people asking me how
I could watch those kinds
of movies with my
grandmother dying
in the next room.
It took me twenty years
to realize they were the
only thing that could
drown it out.
Pegasus 