New York Encounter sponsored its 5th annual poetry contest to celebrate the 2021 theme: When Reality Hits, with our guest judge, writer, poet, and professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners read their poems in an online forum on January 13, 2021 in anticipation of New York Encounter. The forum also featured award-winning poets:
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, guest judge, Paul Mariani, Rita A. Simmonds, James Davis May, Ned Balbo, Catherine Chandler, Elisabeth Murawski, Kathleen O'toole, Jeannine Pitas, John Poch
⟶ FIRST PRIZE
Andrew Lustig holds the Holmes Rolston III Chair in Religion and Science at Davidson College. Earlier, he directed Rice University's Biotechnology, Religion, and Ethics Program, served as academic director at the Institute of Religion in the Texas Medical Center, and was staff ethicist for the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. He is a founding co-editor of Christian Bioethics and a former columnist for Commonweal magazine.
Invitation
I rise subdued by extra hours of sleep.
The morning rituals are slow to start.
To be the only company I keep
requires that I make solitude an art.
This virus unannounced has left the world
a cheerless chronicle without a plot,
a needlepoint we set aside unpurled,
a reckoning with all that we are not.
But it may be a beckoning to more
than all the busyness that came before,
a quiet voice, a coaxing at the core,
the opening of a long-neglected drawer
where we stored keepsakes for a day of need
or recompense, a time to take our heed.
⟶ SECOND PRIZE:
Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, The Midwest Quarterly, Literary Mama, Shenandoah, Cider Press Review, Great Lakes Review, Natural Bridge, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in a creaky, old farmhouse on twenty rural acres in Indiana. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her debut collection of poems, Thunderhead, was published by Slant Books in 2020.
Missing Parts
Not once during the stay-at-home order
has my husband cooked pretend food
for me and asked me to taste it.
He has not taken my pretend order
at the pretend restaurant in the toy room,
nor spun the pictures of steak and carrots
in the blue plastic shopping toy to tally
my cart. For days, I haven't been asked
to turn doll clothes right side out, soothe
a fussy toddler or Cabbage Patch, change
any diapers, real or pretend, or comfort
a teething baby or teddy bear or dinosaur.
No one has asked to play Play-Doh.
No one has banged the big plastic spoon
in the over-sized turquoise bowl
or tossed in handfuls of invisible vegetables
and seasoned them with invisible salt.
No one has asked for a second banana
or too many chocolate graham crackers.
No one has asked me to read,
in my best distressed Grover voice,
The Monster at the End of This Book
or shouted "Hee Haw!" a dozen times
and worried about the donkey's missing
leg and his eye patch while I'm reading
The Wonky Donkey. For days now, no one
has hugged my neck or sat on my lap.
I am a wonky grandma, missing parts
of myself. I have not walked to "the forest,"
twin line of pines out back, in search
of pretend adventure, or swung any gigglers
on swings, or walked to the mailbox
and back, a small, sticky hand in mine.
I have not blown out pretend candles
on a Duplo layer cake of primary colors,
or been asked, "Strawberry, blueberry,
or pineapple?" before being served
a generous calorie-free portion. I have not
smacked my lips and declared, "De-licious!"
then asked for seconds . . . for weeks now
though it seems longer, and frankly, I am starving.
⟶ THIRD PRIZE:
Amit Majmudar is a novelist, poet, translator, essayist, and diagnostic nuclear radiologist. Majmudar’s latest books are Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf/Penguin Random House India, 2018) and the mythological novel Sitayana (Penguin Random House India, 2019) and the historical fantasy Soar (Penguin Random House India, 2020). His fourth poetry collection is What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His novel Partitions (Holt/Metropolitan, 2011) was shortlisted for the HWA/Goldsboro Crown Prize for Historical Fiction and was named Best Debut Fiction of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and his second novel, The Abundance (Holt/Metropolitan, 2013), was selected for the Choose to Read Ohio Program. His poetry has appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 25th Anniversary Edition, numerous Best American Poetry anthologies, as well as the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and Poetry; his prose has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, The Best American Essays 2018, and the New York Times. His first poetry collection, 0',0', was shortlisted for the Norma Farber Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his second collection, Heaven and Earth, won the Donald Justice Award. He also edited an anthology of political poetry, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Knopf, 2017). Winner of the Anne Halley Prize and the Pushcart Prize, he served as Ohio's first Poet Laureate. He practices diagnostic and nuclear radiology in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, twin sons, and daughter.
Year of the Rat
The restaurant we could not enter
had the Chinese zodiac on its paper placemats.
This was the Year of the Rat. We burrowed
underground and chewed our fingernails.
Were we vectors? Was that a cough?
Plague rats were a thing of the past: ships stalled
offshore for forty days and forty nights,
the captain burning with fever, with prophecy
like the bush on Sinai. We learned to trust
no commandment from on high, no agency,
no institute, no office Oval or otherwise.
The rose garden we could not reenter
was last year, Edenic with its minor brouhahas.
We soaped the apple and rinsed the apple,
wondering if death might still slip in.
The facts were somewhere, hidden in a book
in the bookstore we could not enter.
That summer was one long forest fire.
You can end up inside a forest fire or inside
a plague without entering either.
The same holds true of a family.
Rats had chewed a furrow in our air
conditioner’s foam sleeve—split open
like overripe fruit, a great divide,
a harrowing sure to deepen in the Year
of the Ox yoked to the plough’s tooth.
We applauded the doctors who could not heal us
and the statesman who could not weld
two halves of a people in love with being unwell.
In the fever heat of late July
I stripped the damaged insulation,
and the raw, icy pipe startled my palm.
I knelt and pressed my forehead to it, grateful,
then sat back and let it cool the country down.
