Summer 2009 Writing Regimen Contest Winner
At the end of every month-long writing regimen for adults, participants are invited to submit up to three of their best regimen-inspired pieces for a chance at publication on southeastreview.org. We are proud to announce that Shelley Puhak is our most recent winner.
Shelley lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned her MFA from the University of New Orleans and her MA in Literature from the University of Delaware. She was a 2007 Maryland State Arts Council grant recipient. She is a visiting Writer-in-Residence at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, New South, Ontario Review, Third Coast, and other journals, and were recently anthologized in Mourning Sickness. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, The Baltimore Sun, and Road & Travel. This August Black Lawrence Press will publish Stalin in Aruba, her first collection of poetry.
For our summer regimen, Shelley chose to submit work she'd done based off of our riff words. This is how she explains her “method,” followed by her winning poem and the 30 riff words that inspired it:
On the first day of the regimen, I decided to use the riff words as poetic constraints: I would write a 30 line poem, using all 30 riff words, one per line. I ended up with two poems that I wrote simultaneously, each using this form.
It was a fun challenge—thank you! Inspiration priced less than two venti Starbucks drinks.
The spring Randy left the game on a stretcher
the practice field was littered with Labrador shit
and Troop 339’s wilted marshmallows.
He had shaken off the dream—a haze
of hiked skirt and slipping bra-strap—
to bike to baseball practice, ready
to butcher the sky’s unbroken blue. His thoughts
were under the ruffles of her skirt when his bat
splintered into knife. At impact, he was retracing
the map of capillaries behind her knees.
The incident became the soft wool of urban legend,
his entrance into the elite: The Boy Who.
Stoned, we wrote poems about the impression of wood shard
onto his soft tissue, imagined a surgeon’s deft touch
calmed his bloating brain, left only the sensation of sunlight
coasting, one-handed, down the hill to his house,
cut glass rattling in his ears,
dirt rushing up.
His mother lit a candle in church each Sunday, but still
he slept the sleep of apple trees. No. He overslept.
That morning and every other, woke in bifocals
and bathrobe, climbing the rope of morning,
stucco coating his tongue. His left eye
was whole, if oddly waxy and always fixed
left, his heart clogged up with only kitchen-grease.
We got the story all wrong: the splinter never made contact.
We had wanted an elegant ending, a precise arc. At the reunion,
the girls were still sure if they kissed him, his marrow would
taste of northern white ash; if they clasped him, his golf shirt would
cling to his back, damp as any future.
June 2009 Writing Regimen Riff Words:
- spring
- field
- marshmallow
- haze
- skirt
- baseball
- butcher
- ruffle
- knife
- map
- incident
- entrance
- impression
- touch
- sunlight
- coast
- glass
- dirt
- candle
- apple
- bifocals
- rope
- stucco
- waxy
- heart
- contact
- elegant
- marrow
- golf
- future
