Honorable Mention, Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by Shanta Lee Gander
Bad Maria
after Metropolis (1927), dir. Fritz Lang
Out of order, I remember dying
before my birth, flesh swiped
over a metal frame, a face
not mine. This isn’t about spite.
I’m a sinner too: I lived in the light
without question. When they rise
to topple your order, they’ll bring
me down. Meantime, why
shouldn’t I, the second coming
of a perfect wife, help myself
to a slice of the pie? Hel,
I’m an undead-ed mother
and I want a taste of Babylon—
but hold the gardens: I’ll slink
off my throne with this delicious
Salome swing to my hips,
I’ll writhe wild-eyed
for your city full of spies
drink their desire and spit
it out in a flood. Now
everything’s out of order.
I made you a son the first time,
I made you a heart and died—
remind me again of the price
you’d like not to pay? I’ll wreck
your pride, I’ll give my sibling
machines the death you denied
my memory, stripped for parts.
No coming back this time:
burn me on the pyre, I’m a Joan
wild for a taste of that heat, a love
that makes me the feast.
And when I’m gone, ash to wipe
from your tidy streets—
will your saint be steel enough
to birth some paradise?
The Holy Pines
Aeneid, Book IX
We never asked for more of the sea
than the air weighted with storm.
Soundless, we spoke through our fine net of roots
worked over centuries. Rain one tasted
strengthened another, we all breathed the delicate
spray of hare’s blood on snow, we felt
the weight of a wasps’ nest fall away.
We knew when our mother made
a deal with a hard-faced god to split,
slice, coat us in our sisters’ pitch.
Mighty and helpless we could not share
in our new voices of groan and creak
the sweep of seaweed or porpoise skin,
flicker of glass eels drifting home to rivers,
whims of the currents kissing our hulls.
We never asked for ornaments.
They gave us bronze bows.
Days half-buried in sand bought
moonlight body-shadowed or water-twisted
sunlight outsoaked by trickling red
from the wounded, mothers.
They meant fire for us, not lightning. But sound
broke us loose. All rockslide and rumble
we rushed deep into a darkness we knew,
and surfaced, limbed again, nymphs
lashed to our last voices.
We never asked for their ambrosia.
They fed us in our dreams. Call it drowning.
Ask the seabound silver eels, if you can find them:
gods refuse to stop transforming
their creatures and it is not what they say,
it is not being born again.
With our hot bronze eyes we searched out every sunken sister.
We burned them blue.
Then we wriggled our sleek lonely uncomplicated bodies
up the rivers almost reaching
the sky that crowns the mountains,
the groves who know how to live forever enough.
[This poem first appeared in Sporklet.]
Atalanta After Apples
They tasted gold,
like the lion’s hunt
like eyes slicing through brightest wind.
They tasted gold,
like the boar’s death
like the soft give of skin over muscle.
They tasted gold,
like the bear’s den
like an empty bed, undressing alone.
Carolyn Oliver
Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her chapbooks are Mirror Factory (Bone & Ink Press, 2022), Dearling (dancing girl press, 2022), and Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming 2023). Carolyn’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Writer’s Block Prize. She lives with her family in Worcester. (Online: carolynoliver.net.)