Live Poets Society of NJ
P O Box 8841
Turnersville, NJ 08012
info
FALL
19-20
($500 Scholarship Prize)
Chaos Theory
Just one week, just one day. Just one sharp-tongued hour &
this accident wouldn’t have worn your name. Another minute,
it is not your father who almost stutters into the crossfire.
Another second, it is not your hand the arrow pledges itself to.
Then again, you can only clasp hypothetical sentence to your
heart for so long, only regret as the tick of the clock outruns you.
For all your knowing, time is a hypothesis your home will fail
to prove. An economy where evening always follows the mourning.
Tell me what this means to you: tonight with its constellation
of grievances, tomorrow with its mantilla of blood. No one could
claim better witness than you. Face of stare, mouth of ruin–
the montage calcifying before your eyes. Even now, there is no
time to forget the way you inherit catastrophe, no forgetting
the way time bolts without a conscience. What more can come from
this besides collapsing body down the barrel of the hour? Watch it
like war story, severed palms, perfect victim in the doorway. Indeed,
this poem should end with you haunting yourself through another
motherless alley. For what is destiny if not a time-stenciled road,
or mankind if not the most volatile of metaphors.
Patrick Tong, IL, Adlai E. Stevenson High School
($100 SCHOLARSHIP PRIZE)
to glory of country mine
At ten and two there is a gap in my head
when I place my flayed palm across my
chest, against the crooked plane of air-hollow
stitches and smeared red paint. Livid
above. all else. Flying darts
come to a standstill and weep infested
cityscape worlds in the darkness: one,
two lands of rising suns rolled down until
their people grow twisted and black. Livid,
above. all else. Our eyes are
pitch to the sky and drip sluggish into
the floor, when we take their tiny bodies
to thrust in stride and place them onto
curdled steel, blooming Viet red. Livid,
above. all else. Stones thrown
into a mass grave straddling corrupt lines,
and steel bars made for the little ones
who once had the chances to slip between
the gaps, breathing dead white sand air.
Carolyne Geng, CA, Amador Valley High School
ALL OTHER "CERTIFIED' NATIONAL WINNERS
Aubade - Christina Wang, GA, Milton High School
Garden Lament - Ashley Kim, NJ, Bergen County Academies
Waves' - Emma Shoemaker, TX, West Brook High School
a walk down lafayette street - Emmy Song, MD, Montgomery Blair High School
Fault Lines - Erin Brennan, MI, Detroit Country Day School
Smoke Boys - Abbey Jean Wrobel, UT, Venice High School
O U T E R S P A C E - Christina Duan, PA, Central Bucks HS West
In Conscious - Isha Rajput, CA, Henry M. Gunn High School
avenue - Brock Daumler, WI, Green Bay East High School
The Eyepatch King - Libby Terrell, VA, Western Albemarle HS
Wonderlust/ You'll Understand When You're Older - Ashley Schilling, LA, Fountainbleau High School
Coming Soon -- Snake Year - Jin Yan Ye, NY, Brooklyn
The Gallows - Gabrielle Sheehan, NY, Spencerport High School
Stars of Abraham - William Deans, CA, Branham High School
a dragon before hedges - Lian Zhu, CA, California Academy of Mathematics and Science
Jigsaw Falling Into Place - Abigail Connelly, VA, Western Albemarle
Copyright 2020 JUST POETRY. All rights reserved.
Live Poets Society of NJ
P O Box 8841
Turnersville, NJ 08012
info