The Cultural Center of Cape Cod 8th Annual
National & Regional Poetry Competition
A National Prize of $1000 will be awarded for a single, unpublished poem
that has not won 1st prize in any national competition. Open to all U.S.
residents 18 years & older.
A Regional Prize of $250 will be awarded for a single, unpublished poem (that has not
won 1st prize in any national competition) by an adult resident of Cape Cod, Nantucket, or
Martha’s Vineyard. All Cape and Islands poets are also eligible for the National Award.
Judge: George Bilgere
George Bilgere’s most recent book of poetry is Imperial, from the University
of Pittsburgh Press. Other books include The White Museum, selected by
Alicia Ostriker in 2010 for the Autumn House Poetry Series, Haywire (winner
of the May Swenson Poetry Award in 2006) and The Good Kiss (chosen by
U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins to win the University of Akron Poetry Prize
in 2002. “In the house of contemporary poetry,” said Collins, “George Bilgere
is a breath of fresh American air.”
Bilgere’s poems and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Kenyon
Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Iowa
Review, Field, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He has received grants and fellowships from the
Pushcart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the
Society of Midland Authors, the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohioana Poetry Foundation, and the
Witter Bynner Foundation. His poems are often heard on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s
Almanac, and he has been a guest on Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. He teaches
literature at John Carroll University in Cleveland.
General Guidelines
 Submit up to three poems of any style or subject totaling no more than five pages
with an entry fee of $15 by June 16, 2014 (postmark).
 All entries should be typewritten on plain, white paper. The poet’s name should not
appear on any page except the cover page, which should include name, address, phone
number, and email address, the titles of the poems submitted, and a brief bio.
 Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please notify immediately if
submissions are accepted for publication elsewhere.
 Manuscripts will not be returned.
 The names of the winners will be posted on the Cultural Center’s web site in
September 2014. No other notification will be made.
 Make checks payable to Cultural Center of Cape Cod. Mail submissions to: Poetry
Competition, Cultural Center of Cape Cod, 307 Old Main St., So. Yarmouth, MA 02664
Winners of the Cultural Center’s 2013 Poetry Competition
Judge: Cornelius Eady
Scroll down for the winning poems.
NATIONAL WINNER
Nickole Brown of Little Rock, Arkansas, for "Clorox"
NATIONAL RUNNER-UP
Rosa Lane of El Cerrito, California, for "Deer & Women"
NATIONAL HONORABLE MENTIONS
Devreaux Baker of Mendocino, California, for "The Immigrant's Bowl" and "The Hanged Man - Seven
Years After The Storm"
Mary Ann Larkin of North Truro, Massachusetts, for "This Heaviness"
REGIONAL WINNER
Margaret Phillips of Eastham, Massachusetts, for "Hiking in Truro, Massachusetts"
REGIONAL RUNNER-UP
Rachel Kate Dragos of Sandwich, Massachusetts, for "I'm Making Your Bed While You're Gone"
REGIONAL HONORABLE MENTIONS
Susan Berlin of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, for "Peekskill"
Jim Morgan of East Falmouth for "Pears"
Finalists
Riffled Page by Charles Atkinson
Fidelity by Sandra Beasley
Mercy by Sandra Beasley
The Dave Matthews Band and Your Parting Silence by Lemus Benin
Graveyard Shift by Susan Berlin
Like Some Hyena of the Jesuits by David Brendan
Atrial Fibrillation by J. Lorraine Brown
The Tiger by Nickole Brown
Night Walk II by Lucile Burt
Pink Sky by William Leo Coakley
Advice by Diana Der-Hovanessian
Plum by Margot Douaihy
Many Chambered by Sonia Greenfield
Milk Carton Kids by Sonia Greenfield
REVISITING THE SEVENTH SEAL by Barry Hellman
Colophon by Greg Hischak
Benefits Supervisor Resting, Lucian Freud, 1994, oil on canvas, 63 1/4 x 59 1/2 in. by Mary Kane
Robins by Adeline Carrie Kosher
poem for Jim Carroll on the winter solstice by Jeffrey Ethan Lee
for and after FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA by Sara Lefsyk
Lessons by Nancy Chen Long
THE LATE INTERIORS OF PIERRE BONNARD by Fleming Meek
Salvador da Bahia by Caits Meissner
Stained Dress by Donna O'Connell-Gilmore
Underbelly by Georgia Pearle
A Fiction by Patric Pepper
A Theory of Violence by Jennifer Perrine
The Higgs Boson by Margaret Phillips
Doe by Catherine Pond
Leaving Oregon by Jessica Roth
Frog Gigging with My Father by Charmagne Sarco
Foxfire by Vivian Shipley
For Virginia Woolf by Rhoda Staley
lazarus by Caleb Walter
Alternate Breath by T J Wiley
NATIONAL WINNER
Nickole Brown’s books include her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems, the anthology, Air Fare, that she
co-edited with Judith Taylor. He upcoming collection, Fanny Says, will be published by BOA Editions
in 2015. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts and was the editorial assistant for the
late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent,
literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years and was the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi
Books. She has taught creative writing at the University of Louisville, Bellarmine University, and at
the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State. Her work has appeared in Bloom
Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Post Road, Diagram Magazine, The Oxford American, and
StorySouth. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry and lives in
Little Rock, AR, where she is the Assistant Professor of poetry at University of Arkansas at Little
Rock.
Clorox
By Nickole Brown
1.
A noun,
as in a commercial disinfecting agent,
but also a verb,
an action to make the water grow
teeth—tiny, crystalline, color-eating teeth—
making the water
capable, bringing red
to its knees,
your oxblood tee now the color of
nipples, your salsa-hot dress neutered to
cheap carnation pink,
all our deepest purple
a sad, dry rot of brown.
A complete sentence might read:
Careful now or Fanny’s gonna Clorox the shit out of your clothes,
but most likely, you’d hear:
Child, you looking like some trash.
Give your grandma that dinge.
I don’t care if you ain’t got a dime.
I told you a hundred times—soap’s cheap.
2.
A noun,
but also a verb,
as in to clorox:
to clorox that carney tub and toilet,
to clorox the chickengrease backsplash and hand-smudge light switch,
as in to clorox the cup
Donason drank from
when he visited.
He was one of the boys
took in,
raised right,
alongside her own,
and he’d come up from Miami
to smoke cigarettes and
to try not to say
goodbye.
Even at six, I could see
the sarcoma
too big for the joy
of the scarf
spangled round his neck.
When he left, she cloroxed that cup twice,
then threw it out.
3.
A smell—
wealth sweetened with a little zip,
a salty tang,
a bright chlorine rising up
to say it’s alright now,
put you babies in water wings, let them splash in,
because this ain’t nothing
like that piss-yellow swimming hole sick
with infantigo, this ain’t nothing like Bowling Green
where the only time she let herself get dunked
was to be baptized in that mudbottom river.
Come. This water is modern,
this water is amnesiac,
with no memory of leathery eggs
of cottonmouths hatching in its bank
or whiskered catfish
holed below;
hell, this water can’t even remember
common spiders that once straddled its surface,
walking the impossible
just like Christ himself.
4.
An agent manufactured specifically
to break the chemical bonds
of color,
as in to clorox the tub white and the toilet
whiter, as in to clorox the tile white and the grout
whiter, as in to blanche a house
a hundred shades of white—
antique lace walls and cloud trim, the unforgiving stark
of formica cabinets and counters, the sleepy snow
sheets, shag rugs, the bone leather sofa and chairs,
the take-off-your-shoes-or-Fanny’s-gonna-whoop-your-ass
wall-to-wall white
carpet white enough to put Elvis’ living room
to shame,
everything brand and spanking and new,
everything white
because you know and I know other people are lazy and buy dark colors
to hide dirt, but you know my house is clean by looking,
her house white
as a baby’s bottom, white
as the pure driven, so white she kept
a black maid six days a week to keep it so.
Now, Bernie, she’d fuss. We got to clorox that damn floor.
Those boys clomped through here—look at those tracks
right cross my clean white rug. And so
Bernie May put down
her coffee, and without gloves,
cloroxed it all.
5.
A formula genius in design—
with high reactivity and instability
it works quick then
disappears,
almost as if it had never been there
at all.
Blow up, blow out, blow over, she’d say
after he took the safety
off his jigsaw with a hammer,
after he tried to fix the broken head
of a sprinkler with a hammer,
after he ran the hood of his pickup through her
carport again.
He knocked us
into chairs and into closets and down the stairs,
and if you tried to stand before he was done, he’d knock you
back again.
You see, me and Monroe,
well, me and all my kids,
we were natural:
we’d fuss and fight and holler and make up
by suppertime.
Ain’t no sense in holding it in, and damn well ain’t no sense in dragging it out again.
Reader, listen—
You’ve got bad water from the well?
We all do
one time or another.
Just splash a little Clorox in and wait,
and not too long.
This is a poison that works quick then is
gone; this is a poison she saw fit enough
for us, for all of us, to drink.
REGIONAL WINNER
Margaret Phillips, of Eastham, has studied at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Castle
Hill in Truro. She retired after 21 years of teaching at Provincetown High School. Before moving to
the Cape in 1980, she lived in Indiana, Dusseldorf, Germany and Kobe, where she taught at several
schools and universities. She now devotes her time to writing poetry and was a runner-up in the
Cultural Center’s 2012 Poetry Competition.
Hiking in Truro, Massachusetts
By Margaret Phillips
The Mayflower Saints may
have walked in this place
where I am walking
where I don’t know how to ask
the leaves or pines in the sandy ground
what happened here then
not study paragraph by paragraph but word
by word talk to someone who knew
those minutes in those days
yet here beside the spotted wintergreen
it just so happens I’m the only one
to hear my questions
I want to talk to the Wampanoag teacher
behind the black cherry bushes
to ask him
to tell about the stolen
corn the stolen seed corn stored
that year at Corn Hill
at what was to be known as
Corn Hill
as in the scene of the crime
where the seed corn was stolen from
it just so happens that I
have experience
fifteen hundred miles away
from this silent path—experience
in Indiana with my grandfather’s
side business of selling seed corn
and with his small profit
buys his own seed
to grow corn to make silage
to feed his dairy cows
to keep his hundred and sixty acres
acres heavy with rocks that rise up
with the frost line each spring
to break the plow point
to freeze the hay rake gears in fall—
it just so happens that broken gear teeth
broken plow points are just the emergency
seed corn money can meet to feed
the hungry finances of a hundred and sixty acres
so it will not starve
it just so happens starving—
ask Bradford and his hungry men—
is only the stuff of time and place
In Indiana in my grandfather’s milk house
next to the cooling room is a smaller room
and behind the pasteurizer a windowsill
and on the windowsill a pasteboard box
and in the box large arrowheads
for deer
and smaller ones called
bird points and squirrel points
that rise up every spring in the clay
first cut turned over by the plow
my grandfather’s plow brings up an arrowhead
some young Potawattamee dropped
flint chipped and knapped long ago
in the nearby hamlet by his family’s lodge
if I could turn and bend agilely down
out of time out of place
I could catch the arrowhead he
dropped silently in the leaves
could offer it back to him
and ask if he knew about the stolen corn
fifteen hundred miles away
it just so happens that the corn in Corn Hill
kept Bradford and his party
and the hungry enterprise alive
this boon needed to feed the babies
but stolen away from other babies
not in dire need but their children
shouldered out by the children
of the saved babies and
the Potawattamee boy who could not see
that his woods would give way to corn or clover
it just so happens eaten by cows not buffalo cows
but milk cows whose milk passes through
the pasteurizer in front of the door
to the windowed room with a pasteboard box
of arrow points in the windowsill if I could just stop
I could see my grandfather drop
his found arrowhead into his pocket I could take it
and reach out to hand it to the Wampanoag teacher
who speaks about disappearance
of seed corn an accompaniment to the just surviving
explorers to the sagging finances
of a small farm in Indiana or
on a path in Truro where
it just so happens lies
Corn Hill
2014
teen POETRY
GRAND
SLAM
Competition
Thursday, April 24th, 6:30pm
Cultural Center of Cape Cod
307 Old Main St., South Yarmouth
508-394-7100 www.cultural-center.org
RULES:
* Open to all people ages 13-19 living on Cape Cod or the islands.
Teens who are not in school are welcome to participate.
* Send your name, age, address, email, school, and phone#, to Lauren
Wolk at lwolk@cultural-center.org. Walk-ins included as time permits.
* No hate language. No props, no music, no costumes.
* Each poem must be performed within three minutes.
* Poems should be performed, not read, but you may bring your poems on
paper in case you need a prompt.
* The slam will consist of two rounds, with all poets participating in
both rounds. PREPARE TWO POEMS. Scores will be determined by an average
of the two rounds.
PRIZES:
$100 for All-Cape Teen Slam Champion
$75 second prize
$50 third prize
“Simply put, poetry slam is the competitive art of performance poetry. It
puts a dual emphasis on writing and performance, encouraging poets to
focus on what they're saying and how they're saying it.”–Poetry Slam, Inc.
This free event is part of the Rise and Shine Program
and is supported by grants from the MA Cultural Council,
the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, and the Local Cultural
Councils of Dennis, the Mid-Cape, Chatham, Wellfleet,
Truro, Falmouth, Sandwich, Harwich, Bourne, & Brewster.