Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by Jennifer Jean
Naomi Mulvihill was a Margaret Murphy endowed fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her chapbook, We All Might Be (Factory Hollow Press), won the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editor’s Choice Selection. Her first full length volume of poems, The Knife Thrower’s Girl, was awarded the 2022 Washington Prize (The Word Works). Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Cimarron, West Branch and others, and featured in Verse Daily. She received the Page Davidson Clayton Prize for “Poly-, Ambi-” as the best poem appearing in the Michigan Quarterly Review by an emerging poet in 2022. She is a veteran bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools.
Selections from We All Might Be
SEA OF CRISIS
A steamer burned and capsized one October,
setting loose its cargo
of apples and people— material for a parable.
One November, a mongrel
named Laika, launched on an elliptical orbit,
circled my parents
before they were my parents. Dead
only a few hours into her journey,
she spun weightless, an idea
realized. Someone said, If a dog, then
a man, so we had men
in a quarter million mile thrall
snapping photos of their own planet
with Hasselblads. They read
Genesis televised. The whole world
was aboard. My parents, by now, had waded
six years in. Off air, the astronauts
horse-traded bacon squares and beef bites
laughingly but something was different.
One said, back where the earth used to be
and the words filled
with epigraphic reverb. Apples and people—
what I know grows infinitesimal
in my dory. I row facing land, my back to
where I’m going. Of Laika, we know
hardly anything at all.
Part terrier, part husky, life in a sequence
of smaller and smaller cages
prepared her for outer space.
(Originally published in The Florida Review)
OTHER SONG
OF MYSELF
To the one who’s ingested an open safety pin, ribs, louver-like,
letting in the x-ray’s blue evanescence, a softness
against which the metal tenses (call this a case of a sharpness
safer swallowed);
to the one covered in spurs and galls
for whom everything hurts —the curtain’s white muslin, the muted tick
of steel down the hall;
to the shirtless girl whose heart
holds her body ransom and the boy who arches his back and laughs
when there’s nothing to laugh at;
in bewildered recognition of the throng
we are and are not supposed to be, the teeming
entirety;
to wryneck and blindness of various kinds;
to every sort of fleshly extravagance, mix-and-match genital ensemble
bulge and twist: Welcome.
(Originally published in The Georgetown Review)
POLY-, AMBI-
I’m writing a book where there’s a blessing for each thing,
even Shredded Wheat, even an earthquake.
When I try to figure it out, silence snows me in.
On a song, there’s a bird in the yard
that won’t decide. Mocks them all—gull,
jay, car alarm. There’s the man who leaps off a cliff
in a wingsuit and a mole that hunts the dunes
by seismic cues.
As fast as a path opens ahead, the sand collapses.
Tiny stranger, alien multitude— the only baby I ever made
came at the end
of the third month. Outside the first blades of grass
vent themselves along cracks in the asphalt.
Under a privet, violets condense
in the shadows’ overlap. Matter and its absence,
the bird sings. Bless the unknowable. Bless the implausible.
Bless the ambivalent.
(Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review; awarded the MQR Page Davidson Clayton Prize for 2022)