The Kentucky State Poetry Society is delighted to celebrate and share our first-, second-, and third-place winners, along with our honorable mentions for our Grand Prix and Chaffin-Kash poetry contests.
You can read the poems here in full.
Grand Prix
First Place: Z Valentine — Does the Dog Die in This One
Yes, always. The dog is already dead,
was dead before you asked.
That is the rule with perfect things,
purely good things.
The universe allows a glimpse. Here is
something pure. Here is the dog.
You can’t keep it.
The cosmic price of love is grief
and it’s the best deal going.
Judge LeTonia Jones shared:
“I chose this poem as the winner because of its simplicity and its gravity. This poem grounds itself in the knowing of its poet. It doesn’t use soft imagery or metaphor to speak about death, nor grief. It accepts death from its outset. It is honest with its reader. This poem knows the ‘price of love.’ The only way one comes to understand the rule in this poem is to have wrestled with grief and then come to cherish it. I trust a poet with such knowing.”
Second Place: Tom Hunley —Poem Ending with a Line from Good Will Hunting
Dissociation from complex trauma means I can have
the home I always dreamed of and the family I always dreamed of,
a wife of thirty years who loves me and four young adult kids
who love me, and we can watch a movie in my basement
my favorite place, my safe space, but trying to stay here is like
trying to keep listening to a radio station as you drive out of town
and through a tunnel and the tunnel is as dark as a magic hat
with all the magic suctioned out or maybe it’s black magic because
on the other side of the tunnel somehow I’m in another car
forty years ago and the driver is mad in both senses of the word.
She says she doesn’t like my attitude. I need to straighten up, she says.
She speeds through a red light and weaves through traffic.
She says she has half a mind to drive into a wall, end it all
for both of us and it’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.
Meanwhile in my basement someone shakes
a bowl of popcorn in front of my face and my hand reaches
for some and stuffs it in my mouth but I’m not really there,
and after the movie my son wants me to get to know
his new girlfriend. She’s lovely and he’s smitten with her.
I smile and look super chill. I learned to look like that
because you don’t let your abuser know she’s hurt you.
You make your face look super chill until it freezes like that,
so I look fine but I’m not really there. I’m in a darker place
than any home theater or any home or any theater
should ever be, and since this is my poem I can make
anything I want happen in it, and what I want is for
Robin Williams to unhang himself and look me in the eye
and say It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.
Third Place: B. Elizabeth Beck —The weather would have to be perfect
Distance is required, even now—Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
If we could share
a moment, sunshine
afternoon among
your flowers, dog
at foot, sipping wine
under tree canopy
blue skies, white,
fluffy clouds above,
I would offer a gift
basket of yellow mums,
my latest book, grace
if not forgiveness.
You would serve
cucumber slices
on pumpernickel
smeared with cheese,
radishes you salt,
a bowl of peanuts,
simple summer fare.
We would drink water
infused with melon,
and basil you snipped
that morning before
we hug hello, sit
together, laughing
at nothing, knowing
everything said
has already been
spoken. Enough
to share company,
knowing it may
be the last time.
Honorable Mention: Katie Salmon — Small Miracles
By the miracle of compound interest
You should love me already, the late night
Thoughts and daily distractions should’ve
Accumulated like sands on the shore
The waves beating on and on, and you –
By the miracle of compound interest
My mother should’ve forgiven me
By now for the time I called her –
(I can’t say)
And the time I didn’t call her at all for a month –
By the miracle of compound interest
The boy I pushed on the playground in first
Grade should be healed by now,
And grace should live light inside me
And everyone who never liked me should’ve bent
Under the arc of time and all my wrongs
Should be washed out to the sea.
Chaffin-Kash
First Place: Bill Brymer — Daughter
If the day comes I say
I don’t remember you,
take the long way home
along the old scenic route,
glance out the window at the river,
its malleable surface,
wind-scalloped one minute,
calm as glazed mirror glass the next,
snags and drift scattered
like freckles across a face,
and know
that in the dark beneath,
the current rolls deep
and determined, unseen
but constant, like starlight,
like love.
Judge Marianne Worthington shared:
In “Daughter” the poet offers one solution to the heartbreaking reality of aging and memory loss: take “the old scenic route” back home and remember that nature and starlight and love are constants, even when our loved ones no longer recognize us. I
admired the careful, concise language of this poem, the quiet and wise voice that speaks the poem, and the images of river as glass and mirror.
Second Place: Samantha Ratcliffe — The Last Last Grave Cleaner
“Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver.”
— Wendell Berry (1978)
You carry this bucket & sometimes
it carries you back. Family sits inside
you like a stone. Even now
it’s too heavy to think about how long
you’ve carried them around.
You are the last last grave cleaner
These are your names. Just you now
left to move the dirt. Just you standing
in front of the old curses, lifting &
cleaning & moving soap suds against
the mass of this inherited grief.
Who is meant to choose what is
weed, but you? Which roots to pull &
whose name to kneel & trace? You alone
carry this weight up the steep hill
there is no other way no one left
only the earth will say I’m sorry
about your loss. Begin with the algae,
the colonies of lichen, time’s outstretched arms
of erasure. For you they’ve grown moss
green umbrellas hovering over every stone
as if to say we know.
Third Place: Erik Zepeda —Is it Easier to Sing in My Tongue
or condensate my dismay and live sigh to sigh
and breathe through the dew of an eye’s leaf
or exhale beads of rain evaporating my spine’s marrow
and maybe then pierce the bubble in my throat
or perhaps splay my webbed limbs on stainless steel
and scalpel my innards to reveal I am like them.
Or, when the Le Lo Lai of my island comes to hum
and lulls the evening air of their prejudice, I’ll recall
or forget that I was a head led tail, darting in a pond
and the rain was not a sign of misfortune to come
or the looming loathing of a scornful eye— it’s a ray
and a bath of soil, blooming with patience, it’s sewing
or stitching the tongue that was severed at the base
and relearn to sing anew what was once before lost.
Honorable Mention: Flossie Hedges — Grand Medium
Her morning read was silent, shellacked by Salem 100s,
surrounded by belongings of the long-gone.
She examined the tarot the way you remember childhood
friendships, as faint shapes fixed in fainter banks of clouds.
Then Granny put up her thinking things, shoved the quiet
of widowhood into the hallway closet and became
a node on everything else’s passing. She welcomed the long
calls, the letters, warped and crackling with questions.
She worked under a picture of herself, drawn as Forsythia,
curled blossoms at the end of a bony, shadowed branch,
and in between her visitors, she paused to tell us
we too were golden—just soft enough, conductive.
Congratulations to All of Our Winners!
Poetry competitions are an opportunity not only to recognize exceptional work, but to celebrate the many ways poets make sense of the world: through grief and love, family and memory, identity and place, loss and renewal.
We extend our congratulations to Z Valentine, Tom Hunley, B. Elizabeth Beck, Bill Brymer, Samantha Ratcliffe, Erik Zepeda, and Flossie Hedges. Thank you for sharing your words with us and for reminding us of the power of poetry to make difficult, beautiful, and complicated things visible.
We’re honored to celebrate your work and your voices.
We accept submissions once a year. If you’re interested in submitting to next year contests, learn more below.
Kentucky State Poetry Society 